Page 10

By Jack Joseph Smith

and so we made the port While as beasts they beat Man While the young student man with feminine limbs yet a face like the wind and a bit sad by While I remember now saving the men from himself soon Because two nights back He had had the seamen in a trance Doing a modern jerry dance Yet as we emerged from the monstrous beating He was the one who was leading While up in the captain's quarters That system of giant proportions Rephiel would cut off their food for starters - But they hadn't counted on the ship engineer Who had beaten his last captain's back Over the starboard side rail

Original Scan

AI Interpretation

GPT

The page remembers a violent shipboard ordeal in which trance, beating, and mutiny collapse into a struggle for control.

The writing moves in jagged flashes rather than settled narrative, but the shape is clear enough: a young man, a brutal system in the captain's quarters, and the ship engineer as an unexpected counterforce. Even in fragmentary form, the page keeps returning to bodies under pressure and to the unstable line between madness, coercion, and resistance.

Claude

Arrival in port and the beating of Mam continues even as the ship docks. The freckled student-sailor who had held the crew in a trance with a modern jazz dance is again the one leading the protest, while the Captain of giant proportions and his Mate begin to plot food-cutting reprisal. A page of bodies in contact, the poem's politics rendered as choreography.