By Jack Joseph Smith
Original Scan
AI Interpretation
The poem questions the idea of progress by mocking a departure from the caves that still leaves everyone frightened, arguing, and bound by old habits.
Addressing a "new you," the speaker treats escape from the caves as less impressive than it sounds. Fear, protection, gendered ritual, and group submission remain, so the supposed advance feels cosmetic rather than real. The caveman setting works like a crude origin scene, suggesting that whatever has changed on the surface, human behavior still circles the same old enclosure.
'the new you': caves we got away from, men argued while women softly ate, until we all lay down.
The poem refuses the upward-narrative about leaving the caves; the ending is a lying-down rather than a standing-up. 'The hair was only as long as the beginning' locates the scale of the change — small, domestic. The page is a tired rebuttal to the idea of progress.