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The historical references matter, but the emotional center is the admission that walking away from loved ones belongs to the same ledger as larger human failures.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 shorter recast of There, flattening the historical catalogue into a claim of ubiquitous witness. The closing I have it down sounds like both resignation and craft.