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 in junk yards / A piece here and a PLACE there, / nothing to brag about'. 'Then all of your songs / And all of your deeds / Took you way into the air' lifts the memory off the ground, and the handwritten 'Just for twice' above the next line frames the confession that follows: 'I had a clip with a tight grip, / that made nonscience out of staying alive' - recklessness suspending conscience, as on the neighboring pages. A second handwritten line, 'AND I WAS getting A SMALL MEASURE', adds a note of modest reward before the proverb of unpretentious worth: 'They have never had to act like sports figures, / about being good; / just look under the hood', where the handwritten 'They' replaces a struck typed 'We' and turns the credo from self-description to a portrait of others. The source spelling 'nonscience' is kept as written; the page's double-struck ghosting is not carried into the text.