By Jack Joseph Smith
Original Scan
AI Interpretation
This page reduces seeing to something bodily and exhausted, as if vision itself has become another burden of civilization.
The poem moves from perception to emptiness very quickly. Its plain diction makes the final refusal of being taken anywhere anymore feel earned rather than dramatic.
'The View' questions whether watching ever amounted to seeing: 'Didn't I see It / Wasn't it everything / Across my bones / I lay and watch / But that isn't seeing.' Perception turns bodily and diminishing -- 'Crushed like little life / That is a comfort / Squarming weedless' (the typed 'Squarming' preserved) -- and the poem indicts the larger order, 'Civilization, / beginning with being empty.' Agency is external: 'Force took me / From one plaze / To another,' where the scan-backed 'plaze' is kept verbatim. The flat closing refusal -- 'If I were younger / I would not / Take me there / Anymore' -- reads as exhausted rather than defiant, a quiet retraction of any future journeys. The double-spaced one-line stacking makes each statement land as a separate small verdict on a life of being moved without choosing.