Page 7

By Jack Joseph Smith

There When I chickened out I was there,, when I had a song and left it, I was there; when Paris was named in fifty two before Christ, I was there, every time I walked away from the ones I loved, notice, I was there;; all the way across destany we are there; I know when, in four fifty two after Jesus T'was at the gates of Rome with Leo, talking with Atila,, cause that is what happens every day Over these thousand's of years I have it down-

Original Scan

AI Interpretation

GPT

This second "There" becomes more openly confessional, linking abandoned songs and abandoned loves to an ancient history the speaker claims to carry inside himself.

The historical references matter, but the emotional center is the admission that walking away from loved ones belongs to the same ledger as larger human failures. "We are there" widens guilt from the singular speaker to a collective fate. The fragment "I have it down" feels grimly double: a mastery of history, or a record of how thoroughly the pattern has been learned.

Claude

A second 'There' runs the same litany as continuous prose and slips in the missing confession: 'every / time I walked away from the ones I loved, notice, / I was there.' Private desertion is set flush against Paris and the gates of Rome 'with Leo, talking with / Atila,' so the personal and the historical share one ledger. The blunt fragment 'I have it down-' reads as both mastery of the pattern and weary surrender to it.