Page 288
By Jack Joseph Smith
By Jack Joseph Smith
Original Scan
AI Interpretation
The speaker refuses retreat and keeps asserting youth, licence, and self-claim even as the poem turns toward an end-of-time feeling.
This page is driven by defiance. A confrontation opens it, but the poem quickly becomes a declaration about how not to slink away, how to keep speaking, and how to hold onto youth against a sense of ending. The final line's strange sun-image keeps that defiance cosmically unstable rather than triumphant.
Fifteen lines that insist on not backing down. The din-din-din refusal, the pride in veggance, and the closing I'm I the end of that part of the sun turn personal confrontation into eschatology. The speaker is done apologizing for existing at the end of something.