By Jack Joseph Smith
Original Scan
AI Interpretation
The poem builds a violent cosmology where black holes, suns, flesh, spirit, and devilish fact churn together in an endless cycle.
The language moves through tunnels, atoms, sharks, fire, and deep blackness as if creation and destruction are the same event viewed from different angles. Mind alone spins war as power gives conflict a central role in the universe imagined here. The syntax is fragmentary and incantatory, but the pressure of the lines keeps returning to a struggle between spirit and brute control.
An untitled typed poem in three four-line stanzas that descends from 'The Black Hole down / Eternal turn toward gone' to a 'Next Universe at the bottom Sun', passes a silver tunnel 'After flesh burned forever' where 'Mind alone spins war as power', and ends where 'the devel came in control of fact / Spirit due still cancels with Lot'.
The poem builds a private cosmology out of physics and scripture, with black holes, suns and atoms sharing space with the devil, spirit and Lot. Loose rhymes and short declaratives give it the feel of an incantation more than an argument. Creation and destruction blur, and spirit appears as the force that finally cancels or balances the devil's hold on fact.