By Jack Joseph Smith
Original Scan
AI Interpretation
The page addresses beauty, queenship, locked-up hurt, princely speech, haystack birth imagery, luck, and the handwritten claim that flesh and bone are part of the same declaration.
The corrected text makes the emotional hierarchy clearer: the beloved is queen, origin, and burden. The handwritten ending pulls the page back into bodily material after its elevated language of beauty and birth.
This untitled page crowns the beloved while confessing the cost of that elevation. The speaker offers fidelity - 'I did my best to do everything / And you are the best I have ever seen' - and credits her self-authored beauty: 'it was you that made / decisions about your beauty, / after that only love could share.' Royalty is burden: 'It is hard to be a Queen, / it hurts to lock one self up,' and 'Sight is your horror; with the / disengaged advice you lend.' The speaker answers in rank and ruin - 'As a Prince I speak from / the drunkened barn' - and turns her into origin: 'From the haystack, / your the birth, / that gives us birth.' The handwritten close pulls the elevated language back into matter: 'good / and luck / And that flesh a bone / is.' This reading stays provisional where the lower handwriting is concerned, since the page is marked reviewed-with-handwriting-ambiguity. Kept spelling 'drunkened' is preserved.