By Jack Joseph Smith
Original Scan
AI Interpretation
The argument moves below and above glass to claim a windowlike power older than physics, where writing contends not with life but with death beside love.
Glass and window matter because they divide seeing from being seen, yet the poem reaches for a force older than any scientific explanation of that threshold. Beginning and ending are described as self-sufficient, beyond the economy of help that shaped the Lauren sequence. The last turn is severe and beautiful: writing is not competing with lived experience but with mortality itself, and love is the only thing placed beside that contest.
Continuation of 253 into the paradox: 'so low as well,' the one before glass, the power that is the window. Closes with the signature line: 'My writing competes with death / Like the love I see you have / There is nothing else.'