By Jack Joseph Smith
Original Scan
AI Interpretation
'Top Of The Line' compresses profanity, beginnings and endings, and the strange pleasure of imagining one's own young death.
The page feels like a fragment of a larger meditation, but its narrowness gives it force. It treats the crude phrase about horses as a way into fatal self-imagination rather than simple insult.
A compressed 'Top Of The Line' draft (here the title is spelled 'Top,' unlike pages 271-272) that strips the sailing material away and keeps only the curse and the death-thought. It opens on the folk insult - 'fuck you and all the horses / you road in means' - then states the governing preference for edges over middle: 'We can not be thinking about the muddle / We need to be concerned about the beginning,, / and each time the ending.' The strange admission is quoted as if overheard from the self - 'how pleased I would be with my own / ess / young death' - the broken 'ess' line preserved from the scan, before the page trails off on 'we necerraly think / that way' (source spelling necerraly). The fragment makes the crude phrase a doorway into fatal self-imagining rather than mere insult.