In Time

By Jack Joseph Smith

Grabbing it's chance To begin again, and again And again, where there is as far away, as nothing to say, about where we will go Make it look fast as a shot Leave it with your finger Sun or Moon see if go A gun a ball a person "As well as one as another" Literature says they said that in Paris, before the war was over Now we say it here, where war never ended...

Original Scan

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AI Interpretation

GPT

A restart poem that immediately doubts whether starting over is possible anywhere untouched by war and repetition.


Claude

The poem's stuttering repetition — 'again, and again / And again' — enacts the very exhaustion it describes. Starting over is presented not as hope but as compulsion, a mechanism that keeps firing whether or not there is anywhere left to go. The final instruction to 'make it look fast as a shot' reveals the violence hidden inside every fresh start.

At just seven lines, this may be one of the most compressed poems in the archive. Its power comes from what it refuses to provide: destination, reason, or reassurance.