Page 55

By Jack Joseph Smith

The cloth of the gossip priest will be spilled with wine While his Handmaidenlaymen pass silver dishes of deception UNDER THE NOSES OF THOSE KEPT POSSESSED And he who accepts gold plated pleasure rings from greased palmed Kings Will be fortunate just before the word final indeed To remain with the remains of his bottom balled jewels TEMPTATION Nothing will have us: Structural splendor - Dedication to the passive charm of reasonable newness - Artistically manufactured money - Economic Oilcocktail energy growth; brought to us through the frown of a Walter Cronkite snicker - Or the completely unlonely athlete - (whatever desires to stop primitive developement) The ruins and the ancient battle continue To CREASE with power standing against the fatness Till our time toils the artifical heart to a stop As we say smiling, while stroking the dinge of our bones at least fastly thin No devouring menace Can take hold of long practicing dancers

Original Scan

AI Interpretation

GPT

Religious hypocrisy, money, media, and manufactured desire are folded into one corrupt spectacle that keeps power alive while pretending to offer splendor.

The poem attacks a whole social order of priests, kings, dishes, rings, athletes, newsmen, and artificial charm, all linked by deception and appetite. Capital and piety are not opposites here; they work together as performance, coating greed in ceremony and modern polish. Even the body is dragged into that machinery through bones, fatness, and the artificial heart, though the ending gives dancers a hard-won resilience against total capture.

Claude

An untitled satire in which 'The cloth of the gossip priest / will be spilled with wine' while 'Handmaidenlaymen' pass 'silver dishes of deception', followed by the headings 'UNDER THE NOSES OF THOSE KEPT POSSESSED' and 'TEMPTATION', a catalogue of modern lures from 'Artistically manufactured money' to 'a Walter Cronkite snicker', and an ending where 'No devouring menace / Can take hold of long practicing dancers'.

Church, crown, market and television news are lined up as one ceremony of bribery, with the man who takes 'gold plated pleasure rings / from greased palmed Kings' left holding only 'the remains of his bottom balled jewels'. The TEMPTATION list piles fragments ending in dashes, so the lures feel endless and interchangeable. The closing dancers suggest that disciplined, long-practiced movement is the one thing appetite and power cannot swallow.