Older Now

By Jack Joseph Smith

You stepped aside for a little while However you watched it happen The way your friends lied to you You were such a fool That in another time You would have been The laughingstock of a Kingdom That would be good enough to be so to speak Or to say to yourself That they, one and all, were gathered as exquisite actors He was told by a good man when he was four years old That he was a bastard from L.A. It was not the nicest thing

ever said to him But it was up there He read that Gurtuide Stien had said That everyone was twenty six, back when she used to chat alot I think that is how old he was when he wrote this And if I were to repeat it there is no question it would have changed This is for women as well Perfect as your first swim Perfect as your first pearl And you have seen them Still stand around and snarl And he holding one hand after another Thought he grew into what he knew

Original Scan

AI Interpretation

GPT

A poem about humiliation, memory, adulthood, and public performance, spoken with bitterness but also a kind of battered clarity.

Its force comes from the way ridicule, glamour, and age all remain in the same emotional register.

Claude

A two-page poem of retrospect that watches a younger self be deceived - 'The way your friends lied to you / You were such a fool' - and reframes the betrayers as 'exquisite actors'. It folds in a wound from age four ('That he was a bastard from L.A.'), a Gertrude Stein remark that 'everyone was twenty six', a self-conscious note that 'I think that is how old he was / when he wrote this', and ends with the figure 'holding one hand after another' who 'Thought he grew into what he knew'.

Being 'older now' is rendered not as wisdom but as the ability to re-read past humiliation with composure - to recast the friends who lied as 'gathered as exquisite actors' is both forgiveness and self-protection. The poem braids three time-stamps of identity: the four-year-old told 'he was a bastard from L.A.', the twenty-six-year-old of Stein's quip (the apparent age at composition), and the present voice that knows 'if I were to repeat it / there is no question it / would have changed'. That metafictional aside, naming the poem's own making, gives it a confessional candor. The widening address 'This is for women as well' and the images 'Perfect as your first swim / Perfect as your first pearl' set early purity against those who 'Still stand around and snarl'. The close, 'he grew into what he knew', offers a guarded maturity - knowledge slowly inhabited rather than triumph. Preserve source spellings 'Gurtuide Stien', 'alot', 'ment' where present.