Page 74

By Jack Joseph Smith

Who, forge fitted its casted usage for a wrench And not on a dear life for the street amusement Coming from an arse wrapped round the sculpture of a phallic bench And while a stop sign continues its wait for the illiterate And confrontation keeps busy with the bizarre city reunion That Black boy flips back my memory on the appearance of a copper coin; for an early Santa Claus on sugar wine (Young Mister Shine'em On) Without a single policemen's pleasure Had also, stopped looked and listened While the vacant eyed pictyre of a white on white little lady wore pink socks crossing across the cobble brick laid iron rail ___street car street___ NO ONE would be able to remember her face protesting: ...what came out of the walls of her room... AS BEING AGAINST HER Certainly her mother informed her about being clever To hold the percentage of her perception sustained to time would keep her life in line Yet never to be frozen finally into isolation; she seemed the kind who had at least inscribed 1/2 of the dream in her mind And the instinct of the yesterday Black boy knew It to be against art for a face not to be traced While he then smiled to the true Which was inside manly witness: He himself was mixed up In this new forgiveness (nothing said) I had seen him turn his shoulder's down To an okey doke turn faces turn not around And I felt confident That I had traveled with his watching... past our last past A dare doom a visionary tide; STANDING ON A CREEK OF CEMENT Not hard enough to break Unsure distance anymore And did think; should we not be clear from the top?

Original Scan

AI Interpretation

GPT

Street signs, remembered faces, and a boy's smile turn the city into a struggle over who gets seen and understood.

The language is jagged and partly fragmentary, but the pressure is clear: stop signs, illiteracy, confrontation, and racial memory all crowd the same block. A Black boy, a copper coin, and a nearly unremembered white little lady become tests of perception, especially once the poem says it is against art for a face not to be traced. By the end, standing on a creek of cement feels like standing inside unstable witness, trying to find clarity without losing what was actually seen.

Claude

An untitled street poem: a stop sign 'continues / its wait for the illiterate' while 'That Black boy flips back my memory / on the appearance of a copper coin;', '(Young Mister Shine'em On)', and 'a white on white little lady' in pink socks crosses 'the cobble brick laid iron rail / ___street car street___'; the speaker concludes 'It to be against art for a face not to be traced', says he 'had traveled with his watching...', and ends 'STANDING ON A CREEK OF CEMENT' asking 'should we not be clear from the top?'.

The poem sets two remembered city figures side by side, a Black shoeshine boy and a blank-faced white girl, and asks what each is allowed to see and be seen as. Its tangled syntax mimics memory crossing and recrossing a street, while the typed capitals and underscores act like street signs and rails. The insistence that an untraced face is 'against art' makes witnessing itself the moral task, ending on a demand for clarity 'from the top' that the fragmented poem cannot fully meet.