By Jack Joseph Smith
Original Scan
AI Interpretation
This page moves from refusing to speak into a remembered fall, hurt held in the teeth, and the compulsion to touch or expose what cannot be caught.
The corrected transcript clarifies the poem's sequence: silence, denial, looking back, and then the bodily residue of hurt. Its strongest pressure is the contradiction between hiding pain from view and repeatedly returning to it.
Under the blunt title 'Tits', this is a poem about denial, guilt, and the unreachable. It tracks a small drama of speech withheld and recanted: 'I tried not to say a word', then 'when I said I did not', then 'I looked back / and told them I did'. A child falls 'While I was thinking', and hurt lodges physically - 'I had little to mention / im my teethh'. The source oddities ('somewhereca', 'ThenI', 'teethh') keep the page raw. Its truth is a paradox of compulsion: 'You can't catch it, / but when your bad,, / you will try like hell to touch it', while refusing to 'let it be looked at' - 'What is not see about the quiet breed'.