Nine lines are enough for Jack Spicer to dismantle the human body and leave behind something stranger than a skeleton. "Friday, the 13th" begins with a small, almost cheerful piece of anatomy, "a little machine" at the base of the throat, and ends by claiming that this machine is nearly all there is. Between those two points, the poem quietly empties out the idea of a person.
The opening statement sounds like a fact from a science textbook: the machine "makes us able to say anything." The word "anything" is generous, even grand. Speech seems to promise limitless possibility. But the machine is "little," and the diminutive tone matters. Whatever grandeur language has, the poem suggests, it comes from a modest mechanism, not from a soul. The throat is a workshop where words are produced, not a shrine where meaning lives.
Then the poem looks lower. Under the throat are "carpets / Red, blue, and green-colored." This is a surprising image, and the awkward phrase "green-colored" gives it a flat, deliberately childlike quality, as if someone were describing a house to a stranger without much interest in beauty. Carpets belong to rooms, and rooms belong to houses, so the body quietly becomes a building. The colors are cheerful, even a little festive, and they keep the poem from sliding into simple gloom. The line "I say the flesh is not grass" refers to the old Biblical comparison of human flesh to grass, withering and short-lived. Spicer refuses the comparison. Flesh is not a living thing that grows and fades; it is furnished space.
That refusal sets up the poem's most unsettling image. The body is "an empty house / In which there is nothing / But a little machine / And big, dark carpets." The word "nothing" arrives and is immediately contradicted by "But," a small turn that mirrors how the poem works throughout: it announces emptiness and then lists what fills it. The earlier carpets, bright in their colors, have now become "big" and "dark," so the same objects look different once the house has been declared empty. The scale shifts too. The machine stays little while the carpets grow big, leaving the voice-box dwarfed by the surfaces around it. Speech is tiny; the flesh around it is vast, heavy, and silent.
The form supports this. There is no rhyme, and the lines are short and plain, closer to speech than to song. Several lines are almost bare statements ("It is an empty house"), and the repetition of "little machine" at the start and the end builds a loop, so that the poem finishes by returning to where it began, as though nothing outside the machine could be found. The syntax is simple, but the logic is slippery. The speaker says "I say," yet the poem has just told us that this "I" is produced by a little machine. The voice announcing the emptiness belongs to the very device it describes.
That paradox may be the poem's real center. If language is only a mechanism in the throat, then speaking cannot prove that anyone is home. And yet the poem speaks, precisely and with a dry wit. The title, "Friday, the 13th," adds a note of superstition and bad luck, a day when things are expected to go wrong, which gives the quiet horror a half-joking tone. Spicer's gloom is deadpan, not melodramatic.
The poem is significant because it takes a very old question, what a human being is made of, and answers it with household objects instead of lofty abstractions. There are no angels or souls here, only machinery and carpet. The effect is both comic and chilling, and it lingers because the image is so easy to picture and so hard to shake: a house in which a small voice keeps working, with no one visibly living there.