Page 80
By Jack Joseph Smith
By Jack Joseph Smith
Original Scan
AI Interpretation
This page imagines quiet not as peace but as a pressure that can warp grief, thought, and bodily feeling.
The imagery is industrial, infernal, and intimate at once. Silence here feels active and corrosive rather than empty.
'Quiet' makes silence a corrosive pressure rather than peace. It opens as cold logic -- 'If this game has no way out / I can kill and gain, / there is not a question about it' -- then claims silence as craft: 'If silence is my study, / still I can twist your sorrow, / into just right.' The imagery turns infernal and industrial: 'Our dungon of dreams reals its, / way up from Dante,' and 'The putrid love of dye, / is your love, / in the belly, / of a paper mill.' Quiet becomes spectral and unfelt by most -- 'how can a ghost have extreams,' 'There are many who do not know, / about how quiet feeling can be' -- before it gets bodily: 'The burn in the brain; / the crush of the heart. / outside one's self.' The close, sharpened by the handwritten 'eye' substitution and the inserted 'The lip,' insists silence is not enough: 'still if you have a eye and a finger; / The lip quiet does not do it.' Source spellings 'dungon,' 'reals,' and 'extreams' are kept as written.