By Jack Joseph Smith
Original Scan
AI Interpretation
The poem speaks in a flat, exhausted voice that treats farewell to the world as something already completed rather than still being decided.
Its power comes from compression: the past is "written off," time is sunk, songs are lonely, and even rhyme is cut off from sunlight. Bodily phrases like "craving eyes" and "mis-step in our gut" keep the despair physical instead of abstract. By the end, kissing the world goodbye is stated without drama, which makes the emotional numbness more severe.
This untitled typed poem declares 'There is no need now / The past has been written off / Like time sunk in cement at Worlds Fairs', and describes a 'we' who 'sing of lonely shots of piercing stardust', cannot 'step off of street cornors;' for 'the mis-step in our gut', and have 'kissed the world goodby'.
The poem speaks for a worn-out collective voice that has already given up the future, comparing the buried past to World's Fair time capsules. Its images join cosmic reach ('stardust') with bodily paralysis on a street corner, and the flat last line, which refuses even to call the farewell 'a dream', makes the resignation sound complete rather than dramatic.