By Jack Joseph Smith
Original Scan
AI Interpretation
The poem treats ego as something tested by sky-walking, stars, death, wind, laughter, and the mistake of looking too widely without understanding place.
It has a sharp corrective force. The page wants transcendence, but only if it can survive contact with limits.
'Ego' is a poem of attempted transcendence and its corrections. The speaker sees himself 'no different / when I walked across the sky,' 'Tumbling from linen / to the stars,' and meets mortality head-on: 'I saw death coming down / How excited I was / to go beyond it.' It then names its own errors -- 'The mistake of looking widely,' to 'misunderstand certain places' -- before issuing terse instructions: 'Go see the end of the wind / Protect yourself, ignore laughter,' and, in a handwritten close, 'Find A resting PLACE.'