Page 31
By Jack Joseph Smith
When I arrived in EL PASO and
was walking across the Bridge
to W I stopped yelling
inside, and there would of
coourse be no crying; there
I did not suppose, and I did
not sense, I simply knew
I was gone.
Original Scan
AI Interpretation
GPT
Crossing into El Paso becomes a moment of inward severance, where the speaker stops yelling and recognizes he is already gone.
Even in fragmentary form, the page has a decisive emotional arc. The bridge is both literal and psychic, and the point of the passage is not arrival but the quiet certainty that some earlier self has already been left behind.
Claude
The El Paso bridge page: walking across into Juarez the inner yelling stops, there will be no crying, nothing to suppose or sense, only the simple knowledge that he is gone.