By Jack Joseph Smith
Original Scan
AI Interpretation
The speaker describes a changed relationship with an absent man, contrasting shrinking and material possessions with sunshine, rain, and the stars. A handwritten closing phrase brings street lighting into the address to the poor.
Physical direction, remembered companionship, and looking upward connect the page's fragments. The handwritten addition about the tips of something remains incomplete, and its letter case is provisional. The man's absence is not enough to establish a death, the speaker's identity, or an autobiographical event.
The poem says 'We are harder / Him from underneath', with the handwritten 'ThE Tips of my', recalls 'He was just a good guy in the night', and ends 'And say what wonderful luck / for the poor Without A strEEt Light'.
Memory of a lost companion turns into a wry blessing on the dark; the incomplete handwritten 'ThE Tips of my' is kept as written, without supplying a missing word.