Untitled ("When childhood never stops being tempting")

By Jack Joseph Smith

When childhood never stops being tempting You will not have to say I will be something someday And caged knows what swims in a tank While whatever ring you got is taken off when wildlife is daylight Drop the block and tackle Up with nothing, skidding with loose ends Feel lucky hangman, find a women for a deep dark secret, for where we might of been is nobodies future Cutting his ladies splendor against cowboys He had wide oaks brining oceans to the desert And knowing there is no such number as seven, he never placed a bet on a candle With a monkey, I suppose some snakes and desolate birds Wanders become foreign still die for the jib

Original Scan

AI Interpretation

GPT

A restless poem about arrested growth and masculine drift, where childhood refuses to stay behind and adulthood never fully coheres.

Claude

This untitled poem hangs on its opening conditional - 'When childhood never stops being tempting' - and follows the consequences of never outgrowing it: you need not promise to 'be something someday', the 'ring you got is taken off', you go 'Up with nothing, skidding with loose ends'. It drifts through frontier-cartoon imagery - a hangman, 'cowboys', 'wide oaks brining oceans to the desert', a man who 'never placed a bet on a candle' - and ends on drifters who 'become foreign still die for the jib'.

The poem frames arrested development not simply as failure but as a stubborn fidelity: childhood's pull excuses the speaker from the adult vow to amount to something, so the dropped ring, the dropped 'block and tackle', and the accumulating 'loose ends' read as a chosen looseness rather than a fall. Its strangest figure, 'when wildlife is daylight', compresses the wild and the visible into one thing, as if what is untamed in a person is also what is most exposed. The closing 'Wanders become foreign still die for the jib' (the jib being a sail) bends the whole drift toward the sea and toward the collection's fisherman frame, suggesting that even aimless men finally die working a rig. Source spellings 'women' (for woman), 'might of', 'brining', 'nobodies', and 'sence' elsewhere in the collection mark the consistent untutored hand; here 'brining' and 'nobodies' are kept as written.