By Jack Joseph Smith
Original Scan
AI Interpretation
This page treats social belonging as a lie people repeat to each other until slowness becomes a kind of surrender.
The poem is brief but pointed. Its closing turn makes resistance sound very simple: refuse the world's demand to reclaim you.
'Selling Out' is a terse stance poem that treats compromise as a lie everyone trades. Its conditional opening insists on stability against drift - 'As if steps abandoned their place, / As if time was in any way abstract, / any way unsure' - before naming the corruption: 'You will know the lie. / in the golden eye: / It comes from everywhere. / It is used by everyone'. The poem then inverts worldly value with a deadpan paradox, 'When you get slow, / then you are with the best', praising deceleration as integrity. Its closing is a self-aware aesthetic refusal - 'You do not even need an adverb / To tell the world to leave you alone / And not to get / you back' - the handwritten slash after 'you back/' preserved from the scan as the poem's final mark of resistance.