Page 22

By Jack Joseph Smith

Is it a sink or just a buldge And how finally we are dressed We follow forlorn from farmtowns And we are not dreaming as we dream Born with slaughter We are the same Cared for awake I just can't speak I've heard about big pigs And junket craw fish Once I saw twelve pigs strung with the sword and done But Don said he had to have it on a leash. I didn't know what a promontory was, until I got dropped off in the Fifi Islands I think at the end of a promontory Is where you end an affair

Original Scan

AI Interpretation

GPT

This page treats dress, deformity, dreaming, and farmtown aftermath as questions of shape and appearance rather than stable identity.

The poem's strength is its uncertainty. A sink, a bulge, dress, and dream all become unstable categories, which keeps the page slightly uncanny.

Claude

Section 'X' opens on uncertainty of form - 'Is it a sink or just a buldge' - and a drifting collective: 'We follow forlorn from farmtowns,' 'Born with slaughter / We are the same,' 'Cared for awake / I just can't speak.' It tilts toward the grotesque with 'big pigs / And junket craw fish' and the memory of 'twelve pigs strung with the sword and done,' qualified by 'Don said he had to have it on a leash.' The page ends on a learned definition - the speaker didn't know 'what a promontory was' until 'the Fifi Islands,' deciding 'the end of a promontory / Is where you end an affair,' keeping 'buldge' and 'Fifi.'