By Jack Joseph Smith
Original Scan
AI Interpretation
The speaker refuses retreat and keeps asserting youth, licence, greatness, 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 restored line about changing greatness sharpens the page's challenge before the final strange sun-image keeps that defiance cosmically unstable rather than triumphant.
Pure defiance turning a confrontation into eschatology. 'A man turned on me so I told / him to stop', then the stammering refusal 'No I din din din not'. The speaker won't retreat -- 'I don't slink away / Proud of my veggance' -- and dares the world: 'Go ahead out and ask / This is the end of time / To say I am young / And do not listen'. It closes on a strange, unstable cosmic claim rather than triumph: 'I'm I the end of that part of the sun'.