By Jack Joseph Smith
Original Scan
AI Interpretation
Slanted gathers worsening conditions, displacement, confusion, and indecision in a poem that sounds weary with history but still ends on the image of someone having kicked the can forward.
The page has a bitter public mood. It treats decline as both collective and strangely unresolved, with nobody fully willing to decide anything.
'Slanted' tracks a steady, unwilled decline - 'So to get worse each week,, / ... Ever though not on purpose' - where 'Wild and wicked is confusing / And change is just better at it.' The speaker gestures at collective grievance ('We should all be upset over displacement') while conceding 'that is where it all began,' and ends in stalemate: 'No mind will ever make their mind up / But I have kicked the can.' The closing idiom shrugs the whole argument forward, decision deferred, motion preserved.