By Jack Joseph Smith
Original Scan
AI Interpretation
The poem rejects the lie of unprecedented crisis by returning to knife fights, race, and the old knowledge that life has always been trouble.
The page's title makes the argument feel terminal: disaster is not proposed, it is already certain. The poem refuses the comfort that madness is new, insisting that violence and trouble were already part of what people grew up with.
The collective 'We' speaks in clipped certainties: 'Always we are further / tham nature', 'We do not suggest deaster / We are sure of it', 'life / is a bunch of troubble'. The poem's accusation is against false novelty -- 'We lie / We say this madness is new' -- when 'knife fights / With whites' are something 'we gtew up with', so the title 'The End' names not an apocalypse but the refusal of any comforting sense that the violence is unprecedented.