Page 6

By Jack Joseph Smith

un Reach your rifle off the rack and wrap its run, hold A squint through the rear window And THE side door Now And I talk to THE ENEMY in THE wireless And in THE wire for I Rememember the great Gibbons, when he said, "I slapped him down after he said he was sorry, when he said it like he didn't mean it" Deal with brokerage where desire is the secret Say one thing at a time, when in particular your prodding and prowling, by the nature of your beast, means you have been selective only About incident which insures for the bully the chances of loss being slight, with the shirk of vanity giving gain at least some gloat You need to look in the mirror and say, "I won't clean your clock like a con man; I'll clean your clock like I can" Direct and dangerous you are, and dirty is the victums dread Unfinished business and the loss of, Sainthood in the family, makes you Shakespear And Now Even with thE star on your vest, HERE'S THE HOPE I NEED to get us out of this we do not need to get more out of For THE REAL AMERICAN dREAM While watching which is a muddy field, and a Moonlit baseball bat Abstract thE bLOod of A flag you'll NEvEr find YOU ANd ME TWO Mr.

Original Scan

AI Interpretation

GPT

The speaker addresses force and predation through a rifle, enemy speech, a remembered Gibbons remark, and the claim to clean someone's clock. Sainthood, an American dream, and a moonlit baseball bat accompany handwritten fragments about a flag and an address to you and me.

The speaker ties threats to desire, brokerage, and family loss. The handwritten hope asks to get us out of this, while another surviving typed line rejects getting more out of something. Their placement and the detached flag fragments remain provisional, so the page does not fix one complete argument or identify the named people.

Claude

A typed draft revised heavily by hand, the page opens 'Reach your rifle off the rack and wrap its run,' and has a speaker say 'And I talk to / THE ENEMY / in THE wireless'. It recalls 'the great Gibbons' who 'slapped him down after he said he was sorry', rehearses 'I'll clean your clock like I can', and claims 'Sainthood in the family, / makes you Shakespear'. Detached handwriting at the foot adds 'Abstract', 'thE bLOod of A flag' and 'YOU ANd ME TWO'.

Threat and self-display run together: the addressee is 'Direct and dangerous', and the hope is to 'get us out of this' toward 'THE REAL AMERICAN dREAM', set beside 'a muddy field, / and a Moonlit baseball bat'. The 'star on your vest' and the rifle suggest an armed figure without fixing who speaks. The lower fragments have no fixed insertion point, and some handwritten words remain unread, so the page reads as working material rather than a finished poem.