The Little World

By Jack Joseph Smith

Hello, I want something that I don't But if I don't want something that that I want The scorge and the life, the catch in the rye he won't hate then when they've been gone A fre varticals & lousy songs The wonder over misery, the shout holding your legs The guess as a true dream, any mistake never cleared Trimuph and the wave of a hand, any one of the seas, were oceans before you identified them, as red and blue and green and orange and gone, and black and white and grey and colorless down Wilder than all the world of thought Little by little we work our way out Crushed alert we don't quit on account We watch pity and hate thrive We don't pray, we laugh, say thank you Jesus, and see scorn as a definate hereafter Look how close we come to killing and taking see how far away they are from streams, natures magic ways, and the end of the line; that is machanically a

Original Scan

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AI Interpretation

GPT

A poem of compression and contradiction, where color, hatred, pity, laughter, and prayer all collapse into one unstable small world.

Claude

The opening contradiction (wanting something you don't want, not wanting what you do) establishes a world where desire is permanently misaligned with itself. Color, hatred, laughter, and prayer collapse into one small, unstable space because the little world of the title cannot hold its contradictions apart.

The 'Hello' that opens the poem is addressed to a want — the speaker greets his own desire as if it were a visitor, which gives the contradiction a strange domesticity.