Page 203

By Jack Joseph Smith

Title by John Hiatt I can't See Rhe Coast Line Anymore I was young; hell was MY pocket book Collage was easy; I could play the game instead So I went to Vietnam and stayed there It is unusual to run into someone who has the same fear and the same courage Not immediate by any means, no love at first sight; over time, hard as hell; opposite, still exquisite reality what I am to do with this, the same rivers, a few mountains, a desert or two, all about a sea and one huge ocean,. barely out of childhood, and tossing your life to most of those troubbled winds, knowing the Southern Cross is a clock, never explaining the North Star, Your good luck with the bad is the same for me

Original Scan

AI Interpretation

GPT

"I can't See Rhe Coast Line Anymore" revises the earlier coast-line poem into a marked-up draft about youth, Vietnam, shared fear, and the problem of navigating by unstable signs, including a Southern Cross that becomes a clock.

The handwritten corrections make the page feel like active revision rather than a finished clean copy: hell becomes MY pocket book, the college line gains an inserted instead, and the crossed-out opening before 'what I am to do with this' is stripped away. The added opposite, still exquisite reality phrase sharpens the emotional contradiction around hard experience. The Southern Cross and North Star still turn the poem toward navigation, but the scan-backed is a clock annotation makes direction also a question of time. Its main emotional claim remains that the speaker and addressee share the same good luck with the bad.

Claude

Revision of 201 with garbled OCR fragments; 'Collage was easy; I could play the game' inverts the earlier 'could not play,' and the piece closes on a shared Southern-Cross luck that binds speaker and addressee.