Page 41
By Jack Joseph Smith
By Jack Joseph Smith
Original Scan
AI Interpretation
Life is figured as a glide, a slipping return in which angels, hell raisers, rules, and a perfect circle all bear on the speaker's sense of endlessness.
The poem treats near-departure and reentry as transformative, as if crossing out of life makes ordinary consciousness impossible to trust afterward. Being watched before one knows it gives the whole piece a haunted, fated quality, and the handwritten 'EVEN with the rule' makes the slide feel both mathematical and existential. The corrected line 'I never went to school' turns the circle into a form of knowledge deeper than formal learning.
A clean recast of the leave-life / circle poem, the slide now stamped with the handwritten 'EVEN with the rule' so it reads as both mathematical and existential. The speaker is again 'caught by angels, / and hell raisers at the same time,' learns that after leaving and re-entering life 'you were always watched before,' and lands on the corrected wish - 'I never went to school' - so that seeing 'a good circle' he can 'necessarly say, / I know this will never end.'