By Jack Joseph Smith
Original Scan
AI Interpretation
The page mixes womb, sand, soap opera, hate, love, degradation, and wholeness, making intimacy feel theatrical and compromised.
With the OCR noise removed, the poem's argument is sharper: the beloved is staged as a soap opria queen, and the speaker treats hate, love, kiss, strand, and empty hole as rival routes to being made whole.
'Slighted' stages intimacy as a soap-opera set and a losing grasp. It opens on an impossible reclamation - 'Taking her womb back for me / Of course that would not help / At the ends of the earth / you can't hold sand' - and casts the beloved as 'a soap opria queen' whose 'set' you walk onto. Its cynical advice is that order does not matter because both poles degrade: 'it is better to hate her / before you love her / Which ever comes first / will certainly be degrading'. The poem ends by interrogating its own metaphor of lack: whether it is 'the kiss', and not 'the strand / or empty hole', 'That makes you whole'.