Abstract Sight, Abstract Touch

By Jack Joseph Smith

Mixing up the memory you made, with the memory you can't make Two experiences to the extream Definately did not put, the double dream to sleep Your brain filled with Heaven Your heart filled with Hell Air, fire and water One to keep you alive The other two applied I remember blood all over a spot in the Pacific The Tropic of Capricorn

And I remember And I am reminded That I can still see Pure agua also And at that place Where the wide view has a least some awareness of illusion and reality While knowing that to pursue both ways there is nothing I can do about what I have seen and what I envision. Even the pieces of sight and touch that suggest the mystical rather than the acceptance of the misunderstood

Original Scan

AI Interpretation

GPT

A poem about double consciousness, split memory, and mystical perception, holding Heaven and Hell in the same sensory field.

The poem does not resolve the split. It lives inside it, trying to say what mixed vision feels like from the inside.

Claude

The poem begins by naming its own method — mixing up memories you made with memories you cannot make — and then inhabits that mixture without resolving it. Heaven and Hell share the same sensory field because the speaker's perception is genuinely doubled, not metaphorically split.

The insistence on abstraction in the title is itself concrete: sight and touch are the most physical of senses, and calling them abstract does not diminish them but reveals how far perception can travel from its origins in the body.