No Biological Promise
By Jack Joseph Smith
By Jack Joseph Smith
Original Scan
AI Interpretation
The speaker calls humanity the last fruit in the soil and describes rent, liquor, bottom-line measures, nuclear power, and mysticism. The speaker urges a return to where myth began while describing power through geometry, guilt, glass, and strings.
The speaker questions promises of security and measurement, then places the army and the revolutionary near the same account of justice. The instruction to point back toward myth leaves the practical destination open.
The poem begins 'We are the last fruit out of the last lime in the soil', sees 'Hell as a planet leads in commerce', jokes that 'The new ice age simply means federally funded trays / For the liquor we'll need', and ends with a game that 'may be witnessed only without reflection.'
The end of a lineage is imagined in commercial and bureaucratic terms, and the satire falls on measured certainty and 'a bottom line'. The closing parenthesis distrusts reflection itself.