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By Jack Joseph Smith

I The Song Of Denny Phillips I was not there when he was born And I was not there whem he died But I know the song of Denny Phillips And dates will never tell me when he was born And dates will never tell me when he did dies I was, little yet, and walking fairly good along yards of stone, when I meet Denny Philips Ages were in front of us Together we knew we were large and glad; our cup rumith over Mystie preperations would always make a legand And there was literally a graveyard at our back As we were tought how athletics dance on concrete Aside from a ball in our hands, we cared about ice when the sun came through the stones. Oyr world was sort of like;, the filed down half flipped movement of all the new moons Mostly it was fall when we fell from walls, and kmocked ourselves apart over all the grasss

Original Scan

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AI Interpretation

GPT

This opening to `The Song Of Denny Phillips` turns boyhood friendship into legend, graveyard memory, and rough athletic mythology.

The speaker measures Denny against dates and official record, then rejects that kind of biography in favor of lived song. Concrete, stone yards, athletics, and the graveyard at their back all make childhood feel both ordinary and mythic. The page suggests that friendship itself is what creates legend, not chronology.


Claude

`The Song Of Denny Phillips` opens — a mythic-register boyhood elegy that insists dates cannot fix the friend's birth or death. The graveyard at their back and the concrete-as-dance-floor framing give the piece a consciously legendary shape.