By Jack Joseph Smith
Original Scan
AI Interpretation
"Sight / Sound" turns a pact with blind men into a bank-scene test of authenticity, where the speaker reads intent and judges the supposed robbers by whether they pick up his signals.
The handwritten Sound in the title makes the poem's contrast explicit: sight is distrusted while signals, names, and recognition carry authority. The speaker's odd confidence depends on a private code with the blind men, and the men in the bank fail because they cannot hear or understand it. The handwritten insertion of the place clarifies the robbery scene without making it less unstable.
'Sight / Sound' recalls a 'pact / With the blind men' made 'cause they are all alike', then stages a bank scene where the speaker, 'twirling / my finger im the air', tells 'these fellows intent / on robbing the place to get lost'. His test is a private code of dropped names: noticing 'they wern't picking / it up', he concludes 'they were not authentic', letting recognition by signal, not by sight, decide who is real.