By Jack Joseph Smith
Original Scan
AI Interpretation
The poem speaks in a flat, exhausted voice that treats farewell to the world as something already completed rather than still being decided.
Its power comes from compression: the past is "written off," time is sunk, songs are lonely, and even rhyme is cut off from sunlight. Bodily phrases like "craving eyes" and "mis-step in our gut" keep the despair physical instead of abstract. By the end, kissing the world goodbye is stated without drama, which makes the emotional numbness more severe.
A spare farewell lyric where the past is 'written off' and renunciation is already finished business, sealed 'Like time sunk in cement at Worlds Fairs'.
The poem fixes loss in concrete: the World's Fair image makes the past a fossilized exhibit, displayed but unreachable. The plural 'we' sing 'lonely shots of piercing stardust' yet their 'rhyme never sees the sun swing,' so the art itself is denied daylight. The body keeps the despair literal -- 'craving eyes' and the 'mis-step in our gut' that now forbids even stepping off 'street cornors.' The closing couplet refuses any consolation: kissing the world goodbye is done flatly, with the speakers declining to soften it into a 'dream.' Source spelling 'cornors' and 'goodby' are part of the page's record.