Page 93

By Jack Joseph Smith

you don't hAvE to MAKE ExcusEs whEN ExcusE you win The wine is in my blood The sun sets through the glass at my throat My forehead feels thin The wild famale dog has not stopped barking for minutes and minutes and minutes The writing room is hazed blue light against the red tinted wooden walls An airplane has crused and crused from the distance Now it wings over the sounds here and there is a hum I was thinking it can all go to hell untill the hummed stillness For the wine was cheep, and I did not feel my neck SEEp with the sun, the sun my brain (call it fantasy, call it dAwN ) so shAdEd WAs YEt I bEgAN to cAll it bEgINNiNg. For fasting is working and the wine has fumed The dogs were turned loose hungry after eating with me, and the writing has been silence and childhood meetings At first the airplane was the fabricated egel of clamor But when it swept I understood why introuption is many times the key that makes illusion clean

Original Scan

AI Interpretation

GPT

The speaker writes amid wine, barking dogs, a passing airplane and the colored light of a room. The speaker first resists the disturbance, then describes interruption as a way to clear illusion. Handwritten revisions introduce the idea of calling the moment a beginning.

The speaker connects fasting, wine and childhood memories with the airplane's movement through stillness. The uncancelled wine-and-neck line changes the draft's physical details. Several marginal insertions and cancellations leave their order unsettled, so the reading remains provisional.

Claude

A typed poem under the handwritten line 'you don't hAvE to MAKE ExcusEs whEN / ExcusE you win': 'The wine is in my blood / The sun sets through the glass at my throat', a barking dog, an airplane, and the close 'But when it swept I understood why introuption is many / times the key that makes illusion clean'.

The writing room becomes a place of drink, fasting and noise, where interruption is accepted as part of the work.