The Little World

By Jack Joseph Smith

Hello, I want something that I don't But if I don't want something that I want The scorge and the life, the catch in the rye She won't hate then when the've been gone The particals of lousy songs The wonder over misery, the shout holding your legs The guess as a true dream, any mistake never cleared Trimuph and the wave of a hand, any one of the seas, were oceans before you identified them, as red and blue and green and orange and gone, and black and white and grey and colorless down Wilder than all the world of thought Little by little we work our way out Crushed and left we don't quit on account We watch pity and hate thrive We don't pray, we laugh, say thank you Jesus, and see scorn as a definate hereafter Look how close we come to killing and taking See how far away they are from streams, natures magic ways, and the end of the line; that is machanically as it is spiritually, I with adverbs simply, during this little world speak

Original Scan

Page 38

AI Interpretation

GPT

A poem of compression and contradiction, where color, hatred, pity, laughter, and prayer all collapse into one unstable small world.

Claude

A poem of tangled desire and grim endurance that opens on self-contradiction - 'Hello, I want something that I don't / But if I don't want something that I want' - nods to Salinger in 'the catch in the rye', and drains the seas of color by naming them 'red and blue and green and orange and gone'. Its creed is communal and stubborn: 'Little by little we work our way out / Crushed and left we don't quit on account', laughing instead of praying. It ends measuring how close 'we come to killing and taking' against 'natures magic ways', with a speaker who, 'machanically as it is spiritually', can only 'with adverbs simply, / during this little world speak'.

The 'little world' is a closed space where wanting cancels itself and values run into their opposites. The opening catalog - 'The scorge and the life', 'The particals of lousy songs', 'The wonder over misery' - pairs damage with the leftovers of consolation, and the seas that 'were oceans before you identified them' suggest that naming diminishes things until they are 'colorless down'. Against that entropy the poem's 'we' mounts an unsentimental endurance: 'Crushed and left', they do not quit; 'thank you Jesus' comes with a laugh instead of a prayer, and scorn becomes 'a definate hereafter'. The ending sets the mechanical and the spiritual side by side as equals, then shrinks the speaker's claim to language itself: he speaks only 'with adverbs simply', in inverted syntax that sounds like a vow or a translation. The poem does not break off; it closes by reducing its ambitions to the modest act of speaking inside the small world it has described. Source spellings 'scorge', 'the've', 'particals', 'Trimuph', 'definate', and 'machanically' are preserved.