Page 75
By Jack Joseph Smith
By Jack Joseph Smith
Original Scan
AI Interpretation
This fuller version of the poem makes inner betrayal feel like a social poison that turns into violence.
The page is accusatory but also self-implicating. What matters most is not doctrine but the way cruelty hardens into a habit of mind.
A fuller 'Sin' that names the speaker's split self outright: 'I have received both, yes, again, / I am the duelality, so I know' (the typed 'duelality' preserved). The same definition stands -- self-hatred as the worst evil, 'no matter of Dante' -- but the social reach is spelled out: 'It is settled that it is among men that I speak, / but of course between women too, / it is likewise / This particular sin of each our own.' It frames the danger as quiet poison, 'One way or another, mostly unspoken, / this is the violence that will kill you,' while self-removal 'simply and just, / shifts the world.' God is 'Uncaring ... on high, or in the block of praying stone,' and the close turns wretched and ambiguous -- 'limping away laughing with blood, for no one is your honor / when not crossing your breed' -- before the handwritten one-word stamp 'confused!', set below a larger gap, seals it. The preserved handwritten 'no't' and the bare final word leave the poem deliberately unresolved. Spellings 'duelality,' 'begining,' 'removel,' and 'no't' are kept as written.