By Jack Joseph Smith
Original Scan
AI Interpretation
This page presents a swaggering communal voice that treats conflict, class, and risk as games of possession and survival.
The canasta comparison keeps the poem half playful and half menacing. The handwritten ending makes the page feel more like an uttered boast than a polished lyric.
'Morrison House' (the title preserved as written) is a swaggering communal-house chant that frames cosmology as a card game: 'Heaven and Hell across the board / Just like canasta', where 'Everyone wins, it changes all around' and 'Its really the connection your after'. The economy of the place is paradoxical - a thief would find nothing to take, 'If they wanted something; / they would have to invent it' - so the dwellers declare themselves 'rich, / Us, up in the air, naw', proud that 'We keep our door unlocked'. The poem swells into capitalized bravado, 'WE HAVE WAR LIKE A / Motherfucker', then closes on an unsettling qualifier, 'Even though WE trust / It isn't thE Mother your after', the broken capitalization mimicking the handwritten emphasis on the page. Source spellings and case ('Morrison House', 'naw', 'thE Mother') are preserved.