Page 89

By Jack Joseph Smith

Poverty Program Intrusion It was on Pittsburgh's lower Fifth Avenue where I was preaching the word after work Which at that time was William Saroyan No; it wasn't Fifth Avenue It was Forbes Street which is one street up South The tavern where I'd gone was down from the tunnel that leads toward the Southside That's how I know now through that huge round stone It was a bad bar with too much mirror and no white light Piss over glassy fine dirt Like the coal one can breathe Finished to a flush from footwork beneath a strung out brick alley lady Like thin resin over a floor of ants For high-heeled, low-soled lonely danced jukebox shoes To be devil enticed down through the faded up gleam of a face peering from the below of 1930 squared black tile She was in nasty garment shape of torn pale green shades With a gray spider shawl tied to her loose-pinned bun of hair Drunk with loss beneath forgiveness of a kind the heavens would pile up on a doomsday While I was young and foolish with fancy notions from my own emotional problem with perception (no mirror now) We had started at one of the back bench hard booth brown black on black tables (the thick of the fiftiesh type plastic excapes me) But from there along the wall I now remember us seated at the bar on... round old cracked red leather able to spin stool high big tops "In the time of your life," I read, "if in that time of your life you must kill, then kill, and don't feel bad about it."

Original Scan

AI Interpretation

GPT

The poem remembers a filthy Forbes Street bar where literary talk, class grime, and violent instruction blur into one damaged education.

The strongest details are material and local: mirrors without white light, piss, coal-like dust, jukebox shoes, cracked red leather stools, and the woman's torn green garments with a gray spider shawl. Against that setting, the mention of William Saroyan and the quoted command to kill sound less cultured than compromised, as if art and brutality are sharing the same stale air. The recollection is vivid but self-accusing, admitting youthful fancy while refusing to clean up the room.

Claude

In 'Poverty Program Intrusion' the speaker recalls 'preaching the word after work', which 'at that time was William Saroyan', in 'a bad bar / with too much mirror and no white light' near Forbes Street, where a woman in 'torn pale green shades' and 'a gray spider shawl' sits 'Drunk with loss', and he ends by quoting Saroyan: 'you must kill, then kill, / and don't feel bad about it.'

The poem builds its memory from grimy, exact detail (piss, coal dust, jukebox shoes, cracked red stools) and keeps correcting itself ('No; it wasn't Fifth Avenue'), so recollection feels honest and unstable at once. Against the setting, the young speaker's literary evangelism and the borrowed command to kill sound both earnest and naive, and the self-accusing aside '(no mirror now)' turns the bar's mirrors into a test of how he saw himself then.