Page 72
By Jack Joseph Smith
By Jack Joseph Smith
Original Scan
AI Interpretation
A drum roll recalls high school, distance, and youth before the speaker addresses memory and asks to finish. Sunflowers, a livestock meadow, crows, and bones close the page with an assertion of indifference.
The turn from remembered sound to the landscape places a wound in the soul beside the wish to end recollection. The crows' inaction becomes a comparison for the speaker, not proof of a particular event. Source spellings and the unresolved-looking but readable bacj are retained rather than regularized.
The poem says 'The drum roll / my God they do it in highschool', 'Even bacj then', 'I now know a deep slit / in my soul', and ends 'The crows don't do shit / They are like me / they could care less / about the bones'.
Memory and indifference meet in the image of crows ignoring bones. 'bacj' is kept as typed.