Untitled ("With a good sence of humor")

By Jack Joseph Smith

With a good sence of humor I write this poem from Pittsburgh's Golden Trangle So should we go back to Southeast Asia To the meglomania of a fisherman in a helicopter No we start work from a strap and saddle in flight The very cayon of the Lone Ranger I say put Texas in Arkansas just for the fight And in a stream of weed of course he was a loner While we're at it, let's put a rifle in the mouth of a shopkeeper, so to have a six year personal card game Work and War, the enduring truth This notion of ball and chain The last I heard it has stayed Between the difference of Dante and nylon

Original Scan

AI Interpretation

GPT

A sardonic poem that turns geopolitics, Americana, and private menace into one surreal argument about violence and absurdity.

Claude

Writing from Pittsburgh's Golden Triangle with humor about Southeast Asia, the Lone Ranger, and putting Texas in Arkansas 'just for the fight' — the poem treats geopolitics as absurdist vaudeville, where American violence abroad and American mythology at home are interchangeable performances. The humor is not decorative but diagnostic.

The fisherman in a helicopter is the poem's key image — it yokes the title's working-class figure to military megalomania in a single surreal frame, collapsing the distance between labor and war.