By Jack Joseph Smith
Original Scan
AI Interpretation
This page uses a string of blunt commands to mock ordinary ideas of power before ending with identification with people pushed to the street or to the margins.
Domestic tidying, gifts, money, and lying about gangsters are all treated as shallow gestures of control. The final turn is intentionally jarring, forcing power to be measured against dispossession rather than status.
'Power' mocks petty assertions of control through a list of small domestic gestures - 'Paint your door / Rearainge the mess / on your desk', 'Give your grandkids / a gift', the absurd 'Spend eight hundred / dollars for a good / gum', and the reflexive 'Just say lier when / anybody talks about / gangsters'. Each is a shabby substitute for real power. The poem then snaps the frame open with two leveling assertions the reader is dared to dislike: 'no matter how much / you abhore and don't like it, / Jesus is a street person, and / homosexuality is a living end' - real power relocated to the dispossessed and the margins the comfortable would rather disown.