By Jack Joseph Smith
Original Scan
AI Interpretation
The page uses 'slight of hand' to blur illusion and reality, suggesting that action, surface, skin, and memory all participate in how a person experiences being on Earth.
It is metaphysical without floating away. The language keeps returning to the body, as if abstraction only matters when worn or lived.
A second 'Slight Of Hand' turns the trick into a creed of action over speech: 'It is not what I say / It is what I do'. The poem pairs off its terms - 'Illusion and reality', 'Positive and negitive' - then lands on 'Sharp', which is 'something you wear / or your skin', something carried on the body. That sharpness 'tells you about being / on this Earth before', floating reincarnation as a casual possibility; and if you are sure you have not lived before, the cure is to be 'doing it right now'. Metaphysics stays insistently worn rather than argued.