Joe Simsone Is

By Jack Joseph Smith

The bridge a ship Coil the rubber, the rope The chocker chains You can not: Simsone walks His father an iron worker The man before didn't care As his wit held him to labor Piece together Simsone Now superintendent Simsone decided not to buy bynoctrals As he builds the beams fold The money in his office have absolutely nothing to do with the boots that sit beneath him Still Simone walks fit The beam struggles 100 feet 1000 feet It is over where the last rivit fits them There back with questions "Simsone where ya-fuck'en with the money" Making out the checks isn't enough Where is the blood management needs? We will save the iron scutter At the parapet we will shove iron right On the pans we will lap good So that all is free on the pour The advance is not an approach It is not social We will do it as if we were paites airplains at sea But far more to thee O Sea The bridge Bulkhead gains or makes loss with industry
Joe simscone was a beautiful man born All call foolish the poetry wind The name oblivion is fact Like the rack on a bunk You are dead if you don't quick drop Not to mislead Joe is wellbread Maybe like the quiver the pig gets on the noised of the slaughter Joe disreguarded the information about him And he lived as a Prince Until the only one was dead And suddenly like his secret suring That leading would cast us unbread He went with a swing, your imaginations has that told the magenime narror now though has not to do with what has been visited No image heres cause what Joe builds is for the first time Joe gets loose like your dream And he dosen't do it cause he's Pilish But he lives above it cause he's also Italian Both of Joes Grandparents were slaughtered That's just to make it easy When Joe went to the grave You could gues his smile before the modern movies He knew Mamma watching his milk ment something different now We've all seen the middle ages act on television And we've heard let it be clear Whell let it be that Joe never will Stone still Joe remained a watchtower on his folks- Joe didn't get pissed off because his fayher got to ding out lousy laugh right across his mamma's toes After all sometimes it wasn't winter Killing chipmuncks was something when Joe was a kid Cause they'd let the rabbits come out near the railroad ties Course Joe's sling shot wasn't taken from any kind of tree It was given at age three by some kind of travelin' man that looked a little black He was passing about to get a street car off around church Gold has nothing to do with God It is always thin And later he liked that Cause it keeps the man inside

Original Scan

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AI Interpretation

GPT

A labor poem and character sketch that turns an ironworker into a rough myth of class memory, ethnic inheritance, and endurance.

Claude

'Joe Simsone Is' is a long portrait-elegy of an ironworker risen to superintendent, built first from the materials of his trade - 'Coil the rubber, the rope / The chocker chains', the beams at '100 feet 1000 feet' - and then from his lineage and death. The son of an iron worker who 'decided / not to buy bynoctrals', Joe is confronted by men demanding 'where is the blood management needs?', and the poem widens into bravado about the work ('On the pans we will lap good / So that all is free on the pour') before turning eulogy: 'Joe simscone was a beautiful man born', his grandparents 'slaughtered', himself living 'as a Prince / Until the only one was dead'. It closes on a worn proverb - 'Gold has nothing to do with God / It is always thin / And later he liked that / Cause it keeps the man inside'.

This is the most sprawling and OCR-roughened of the Young Ben works, and parts of its middle ('your imaginations / has that told the magenime narror now though') are too garbled to read with confidence; that reading stays provisional. What is legible, though, is a clear arc: Joe is constructed out of his materials so completely that man and ironwork fuse, his refusal to 'buy bynoctrals' (binoculars - he will not watch from a safe distance) marking him as a worker who stays in the danger he commands. The poem repeatedly insists that money is the false term - 'The money in his office / have absolutely nothing / to do / with the boots that sit / beneath him' - and the closing maxim makes this explicit: 'Gold has nothing to do with God / It is always thin', gold's thinness opposed to the substance that 'keeps the man inside'. Against that integrity the poem sets slaughter as recurrent dread - grandparents 'slaughtered', Joe likened to 'the quiver the pig gets / on the noised of the slaughter' - so the elegy honors a man who held his worth in the physical and in his blood, not in the wealth his title brought. The dialect and misspellings ('chocker chains', 'rivit', 'wellbread', 'airplains') are kept as written; they are the texture of the working world the poem refuses to sand down.