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By Jack Joseph Smith

The difference in life, like the glide in old fashioned math: Several times I have watched myself slid; EVEN with the rule and been caught by angels, and hell raisers at the same time: Something happens when you leave life, and then turn around and start back in As if you didn't always watch yourself, realizing you were always watched before I wanted so badly to say, I never went to school So that when I saw a good circle,. no matter how it came to be, I could necessarly say, I know this will never end

Original Scan

AI Interpretation

GPT

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.

Claude

Clean recast of the leave-life / circle poem, dropping the marginalia in favor of the angels and hell raisers at the same time crossing.