By Jack Joseph Smith
Original Scan
AI Interpretation
A formal dining scene is charged with menace, as old power, marriage, grace, and wine conceal something predatory and barely knowable.
The title promises kings, but the room feels more like a ritual of authority than a feast. Chairs, wives, black eyes, skirts, tables, and wine all carry a ceremonial polish that is repeatedly interrupted by hints of killing, dealing, and survival. The fragment breaks before resolving who these people are, which makes their social grace feel even more suspicious.
'The Restraunt Of Kings': diners 'Reguardless of age' 'act old taking chairs with their wives', their 'black eyes are long' 'As in a Mass', while 'the outward glance of grace sings... / of the survivor? of the killer? of the dealer?' who 'were shy, / exactly one second before the observation.'
The poem reads dining-room decorum as a ceremony of menace under polish. Chairs, wives, skirts, tables, and 'grace' all carry ritual gravity, and the Mass simile makes the meal a liturgy with 'long' black eyes for celebrants. The triple question - survivor, killer, dealer - keeps the diner's identity suspended, so the grace 'sings' over an unnamed predation. The poem's quiet joke is the timing: the diners 'were shy, / exactly one second before the observation', making the social face a reflex caught a beat before it is performed. Source spellings 'Restraunt' and 'Reguardless' are kept as written.