By Jack Joseph Smith
Original Scan
AI Interpretation
"A Tribute To Time" turns old monster movies into a present-tense warning that history is not private romance but a recurring shape of power's drive to erase everyone.
The screen disappears almost immediately, which is the page's central move: what seemed cinematic is now standing in front of us. The dismissal of fresh romance as useless against what is coming gives the poem a cold, collective scale, and the handwritten rectangle makes that rejection feel schematic rather than intimate. Time here is not healing; it is the mechanism by which danger catches up.
'A Tribute To Time' starts with 'Monsters at will, / Old film, we see it,' then drops the screen - 'Here it is without a screen' - so the cinematic horror is now standing 'in front of our face.' Fresh romance is dismissed as useless against what is coming: 'Falling in love last week / won't work.' History is reframed as recurrence rather than private feeling ('It is not a man and a women here'), the handwritten 'A Rectangle' making that rejection schematic, and time becomes the mechanism by which danger 'catch[es] up' - 'power / wants to get rid of us all / again.'