Incipid Gone

By Jack Joseph Smith

I never thought the deposessed would find me caught For with the night talk or the walk the light fell not Wish candlelight to have thunder like a grand Cascade And watch electric begin to bend all that was ever made While the garlanded ash of the Sun and of the Moon Will oneday call dust their lost rivers in their ruin Yet Earth fists fly folded far across seas in firelight As strange military visitations contend only to pretend Accordingly minds are deranged with the might in down-sight Less a ritual country neck blade across a vanquished hen Comes deadened eyes youthful lost on their way to crime And appointed gangs that guard gates and highways over walls Who find the lower down being just fine for their time While displaced ladies who have taken our dangerous calls Remain disinterested under tongues of very dry wine "View the entirety," says the vendor. "Unromantic are alleys, locked like milk with dope..." He shouts; "they are refrigerated with women standing on their knees!" While little the world has in engagement to its hopes When our baths, just hot, for pigs and skinning Release our premeditated masturbated murder Across the ancient sets of getto stone into a wounded whining Where-upon our parted souls in riddle couldn't get dirtier

Original Scan

Page 48

AI Interpretation

GPT

In Incipid Gone, the speaker moves from candlelight and failed cosmic light through military visitation and gang-guarded highways to murder and parted souls that cannot get dirtier.

The vendor's pitch places women and alleys among the goods on offer. The speaker follows that exchange with an admission of shared violence, joining the premeditated murder to our baths and our parted souls. The scan spells the title Incipid; the work header now preserves it.

Claude

'Incipid Gone' moves from a speaker caught by 'the deposessed' and failing light through 'strange military visitations', gang-guarded highways and a vendor selling alleys 'locked like milk with dope...' to 'our premeditated masturbated murder' across 'getto stone'. It ends with 'our parted souls in riddle couldn't get dirtier'.

The one-page poem is a catalogue of civic and moral decay in which the barker's voice performs the degradation it advertises. Its turn to the first person plural makes the closing violence a shared confession rather than an observation. Uniform long lines and loose rhyme give it an incantatory pressure.