Page 72
By Jack Joseph Smith
By Jack Joseph Smith
Original Scan
AI Interpretation
This version of the poem leans harder into performance and rhetoric, balancing coin, artery, dream, chalk, and music against a sense of threat and placelessness.
The shank-and-drink insertion, the handwritten artery and dream revisions, and the source phrase `needless at nightfull` make the page feel more jagged and submerged. The shortened `didn't have A PLACE` line sharpens its sense of dislocation without the struck reference to a city.
A second 'Accumulation' that leans harder into rhetoric and dislocation. 'The careful hands of care offened the wicked / Not carelessly about what the deed has stuck to' reworks the opening, and a handwritten revision puts the star 'shone' over a 'shrine, just a shank in the drink'. The imagery thickens with urban and bodily figures: 'This penny on the corner is stil a coin', 'There is the laso around artery,' 'There Is the noose on the dream', each line rebuilt by hand from a struck 'What is ... of'. The legal-spiritual menace returns -- 'A soul needless at nightfull / No knees necessary on the red line of rendition' -- and the placelessness line is cut down: the typed 'had a place in any city' is struck and the handwritten 'didn't have A PLACE' ends it, 'As if being lost didn't have A PLACE.' Handwritten 'chalk' and 'squeeks' respell the typed 'chawk' and 'sqeeks', and the poem keeps the music-and-death coupling, 'Any string you can play / Any sound of music you might hear / This is where death lives to concur.' Source spellings 'offened,' 'stil,' 'laso,' 'nightfull,' 'Abhoroxent,' 'silencior,' and 'squeeks' are kept as written; the page's double-struck n-to-m ghosting is not carried into the text.