Page 70

By Jack Joseph Smith

70 and touched my fingers, when I would raise my hands-a little bit from my laps My head seemed’ in the center of tingling glasses tipping the disemblowed Sat of whiskey over. fab bellies on +o reaching oe, nue pretty drinks I could also seo-glimmering’ the illusive light of a false cut jewel’ and held between pink tissue paper skin clinging to one doubble; and four tripple Imotted bonesy that tryed to be so dainty as the blood kissed its way through the thick cream of she and she and she-yntil it buldged thick in the veins below their over concious chins Across the long room of velvet. curtains and inlaid people-would come a silences that' effected me the other way arounds and I would be told to be still, when glasses-were-like the lonesome together sounds of crickets in this place-of lost humans in their inter nights Ice was the bottomless soynd of the empty soul,.when he coyld reach no further into the glassy .while the women could cobdly put her iceless crutch down upon her painted doily and watch him struggle in his-last suffering with the melting adiutements I look away now from théseynreconizeable feelings and see the more powerful depth of the dark blue men who incavern: themselves below the: gaudy haze of midnight lips tightened im paint and fallen in inertias I remember watching the men of the Soke Urea eyes Woyld slip like a spider behind the thin crack of madness, They would brighten to me,,and their eyes would Pete insane laughter covering their brains. and look atime as the only . oomfortable-reality between the ice-of the desolving spirit: and the sweet taste-of perfimed’ deceptions The man would speak from the stage, his face black lined and pale bdveons The vanquished many ene ae sooter now was in. the sounds of ynrelated hands; I always.watched the martenie man starfing blindly at the vanquished man, and

Original Scan

Page 70

AI Interpretation

GPT

Inside the nightclub the child watches whiskey, ice, painted women, velvet darkness, and stage performance turn adult pleasure into a lonely and exhausted spectacle.

The women and drinkers are rendered almost anatomically, as if glamour has already decayed into bulging veins, melting ice, and empty ritual. What holds the child's attention is less the entertainment itself than the stranded men beneath it, especially the ones whose eyes brighten with a cracked, desperate need.

Claude

The nightclub itself arrives as velvet curtains and shadow-swimming light, with Michael reading the ice in the glass as the bottomless sound of the empty soul and the whiskey struggle as a last suffering with the melting abutements.