By Jack Joseph Smith
Original Scan
AI Interpretation
Departure is torn between pain, violence, bus-ticket practicality, and the refusal to let leaving be mistaken for suicide.
The page frames leaving as both wound and practical transit: split heart, killing, bus ticket, bus station, and grief all press against the insistence that departure is not suicide but a hard form of survival.
'Leaving' addresses someone who must go 'When the strain has that tug', then lists what departure brings: 'Then A split in the heart', being 'killed and killing on your way', and something 'Simple as a bus ticket and complicated as a bus station'. It insists 'it is not sucide and someone else's grief / That let's the truth into,' and ends, 'right now you have not come back'.
The poem treats leaving as both an ordinary trip and a violent inner rupture, holding the bus ticket beside the split heart. Its evenly spaced single-sentence lines build a catalogue that reads like advice and grief at once. The last line shifts from general 'you' to a specific absence still unresolved.