Page 84
By Jack Joseph Smith
By Jack Joseph Smith
Original Scan
AI Interpretation
A woman imagined as a star becomes overblown and trapped inside other people's plans.
Crossing the line and becoming a colossus sounds less like triumph than distortion, especially once she loses dimension and never achieves what she fed on. Agents, do-gooders, scenes, styles, and rehearsals crowd around her, making growth feel managed by outsiders. The poem treats power as something that shifts dominion while leaving the person underneath unsteadied.
'The Star': 'She was one of your friends / She crossed the line, / but never came back / Turned into a colossus; / she lost demention', chasing 'those Pyramid's that refuse to sink', while 'growing up by chance, / didn't happen to go along, / with every scene and style she caught, / in her extended children's theatre rehearsals...'
The poem reads fame as distortion rather than triumph. Becoming 'a colossus' costs her dimension - she swells while flattening - and never achieves 'what she dined on'. 'Those Pyramid's that refuse to sink' is the giveaway image: she pursues monuments that will not cooperate or settle. Agents, 'do-gooders', scenes, and styles crowd around her so that growth feels managed by outsiders, and 'power changes its dominion' while she stays unsteadied beneath it. The final injury is precise: maturation 'didn't happen to go along' with the roles she kept catching, so stardom out-accelerated the ordinary growing up that the 'children's theatre rehearsals' should have allowed. Source spellings 'demention' and 'Pyramid's' are preserved as written.