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' (first recension): diners acting older than their age, black-eyed like a mass, grace-song of survivor/killer/dealer.
The poem catches restaurant decorum as a ceremony of withheld information. 'Were shy / exactly one second before the observation' is its joke — the social face is a reflex, not a policy. The uncertainty about who the diner is (survivor? killer? dealer?) is never resolved, which is the point; the poem is a portrait of the unresolvable.