By Jack Joseph Smith
Original Scan
AI Interpretation
A compact, abrasive poem where trade, masculinity, insult, and desire all surface in one raw plainspoken confrontation.
A short, abrasive swagger that returns 'Crossed through the gut' to a farm-and-market world of selling 'cow shit knowing what you sell you can't spell.' The speaker is 'Tough as a leg iron,' resigned that 'The likelyness of respect is low,' yet certain of his own footing - 'I stand sure with the keys' - and closes with a boast of total dominance: 'I'll take the whole gang absolutely / Like making love in a second.'
The poem yokes labor, illiteracy, art, and sex into one defiant stance. 'What you sell you can't spell' is its core joke and wound at once: the man trades in something he cannot even write, and 'An artist knows' quietly claims that this unlettered knowing is a form of art. The instructions to the self or the rival - 'Don't cross stab me through talk,' 'Watch the half mam' (half-man) - frame the world as betrayal-by-words, against which the speaker sets bodily certainty, the keys, the leg iron. The final simile is bravado pushed to absurdity, conquest and lovemaking collapsed into a single instantaneous act. Several phrases ('half mam,' 'bumper gone to dent') stay rough and slightly garbled, so the reading rests on the poem's posture more than on a clean paraphrase.