Page 212
By Jack Joseph Smith
By Jack Joseph Smith
Original Scan
AI Interpretation
Questions about religion, politics, fighting, class, power, and street violence are shoved into a warning about what happens when force starts choosing its own direction.
The verified page reads like a spoken rant with a real center. The handwritten ending turns the warning inward: the mind, the hive, and the instruction to go the other way become part of the same caution.
'Self' reads like a spoken rant that keeps circling a warning about force. It begins where argument breaks down - 'when it doesn't make any difference / When you can't stand questions' - and reduces religion and politics to 'wanting just to fight, / the latter being the best one.' Its hard claim is about misdirected power: 'power finding it's way / out of anything is absurd of course with power / going the other way.' The street fight is offered as a kind of pure form - 'Classic in it's sense' - to be entered briefly and abandoned: 'Leave it alone / Come back if you want / Two minutes or so.' The turn inward comes with 'I had a chance, life on purpose / So be careful of your mind,' followed by the legible handwritten additions 'Hive' and 'Just told me to go the other way.' A blacked-out handwritten word before 'told me' stays omitted, so the exact sense of that closing instruction is partly unresolved.