By Jack Joseph Smith
Original Scan
AI Interpretation
Without power, the page turns violence into thought, function, gesture, and plan, treating killing as something displaced rather than erased.
The corrected transcript makes the poem's restraint more legible. It keeps returning to small actions and abstractions, suggesting that a lack of power does not end destructive intent so much as lengthen and reroute it.
'Without power' is a tight, menacing miniature about violence that loses its means but not its intent. It poses 'What is to be done' once 'Killing is removed', then answers in reduced gestures: 'Slowly though one can try', 'Lifting the eyebrow', 'Cutting clean at the sink / with a thought'. The chilling phrase 'Glimmering yes to kill / without power' keeps the murderous impulse intact while stripping its force, and the flat last line - 'The plan is only longer' - implies that powerlessness defers rather than ends the design.