By Jack Joseph Smith
Original Scan
AI Interpretation
This page keeps the car poem hard-edged, tying swagger and performance to the effort of staying alive.
The language feels revised in motion, but the surviving lines are clear about their pressure. Grip, air, sports figures, and the hood all belong to a world where appearance and danger keep touching.
Another 'Fast Cars' variant, reworking the junkyard-and-survival material: 'Such was the way of looking im junk yards / A piece here and a PLACE there, / nothing to brag about.' The doubled comma in 'a tight grip,,' and the typed spelling 'nonscience' are preserved, and the central confession -- 'that made nonscience out of staying alive' -- repeats the earlier admission that recklessness suspended conscience. It ends on the recurring proverb of unpretentious worth: 'We have never had to act like sports figures, / about being good; / just look under the hood,' the typed 'We' kept although a handwritten 'they' hovers over it unresolved. This reading remains provisional because the page is mixed-quality with needs_manual_review set and unresolved handwriting -- including insertions near 'Took you way into the air' and above the sports-figures line, plus the 'they' over typed 'We' -- so the credo's pronoun and those margins stay uncertain. Source spellings 'im,' 'Them,' and 'nonscience' are kept as written.