O So Simple

By Jack Joseph Smith

A waste of tone, a loss of sound Strict is measure, controled as touch Concherto fullfilling, in its staying tell the end beneath You can not be shallow with a piano Can you even touch it, or perhaps you can not Make a gesture and double it down on a note Draw time with a bulky sign, notes are lost Half time is not well either, unless you have split it from the beginning Cords being better than lines, will come back and once more show you Kings and Queens are the only cards here If you are not careful through the pipe There are no colors, not images to match Let the music go with a strum, or the sash of a place Gutar or violin Or take your company with any bass, stringed to be a tongue; a horn outside the life, of your hands Think of this gift stopped so hard without fame, and through mucic is really, the way we all want to play

Original Scan

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AI Interpretation

GPT

A music poem that treats sound, touch, and formal control as a difficult ethics rather than a decorative art.

Claude

A wasted tone and a lost sound open the poem with two forms of musical failure — and then 'strict' and 'controlled' arrive not as remedies but as the conditions under which even failure becomes meaningful. The concerto fulfilling itself suggests that music achieves completion through discipline, not despite it.

The title's irony is gentle: nothing in this poem is simple. Touch, measure, tone, and control are all presented as ethical problems requiring the same rigor as moral philosophy.