GPT
Childhood rebellion hardens into an adult self-portrait of thwarted intensity, where violence, refusal, and restless truth remain but no longer have open ground.
The repeated "When" builds a history of impulses that are anti-authority, anti-sentimental, and drawn to burning more than play. Adulthood does not erase that wildness; it compresses it, leaving the speaker on a windowsill instead of at sea. The result is both comic and sad, especially in the final details, where self-description becomes awkward, bodily, and stubbornly truthful.
Claude
'Forward Back': a 'When I...' catalogue of early intensities - 'I slashed my fist 500 times to the cops head', 'more interested / in burning than baseball', 'I hate sentimental tunes' - ending 'Now instead of being on the sea / I am on a windowsill', 'With my teeth tinted wavey green'.
Each anaphoric 'When' lays down another childhood impulse - anti-authority, anti-sentimental, drawn 'to burning than baseball' - and the title's paradox holds the poem: going forward is going back to those first commitments. The adult is not the sum of the choices but their continuation at reduced scale, which the settling line names: 'Now instead of being on the sea / I am on a windowsill'. The wildness was 'exactly why I was wild', knowing, not accidental, and adulthood only compressed it. The closing self-portrait, 'teeth tinted wavey green', is grotesque and bodily enough to keep the poem out of self-pity while admitting the diminishment. Source spelling 'wavey' is preserved as written.