The Other Side

By Jack Joseph Smith

To meet you in hell A place where things did not go well I saw you over there I saw you frightened of vision Nothing is called for Incissions, the slightness around things Not meaning from across the hall Nothing dislocated or depossed Just your wond, that I have to put my hands to Now that would be a problem hard to twist your back to

Original Scan

AI Interpretation

GPT

This poem stages encounter, injury, and touch inside a hellish emotional space where wound matters more than explanation.

The language is stripped down but physically charged. Hall, incision, wound, hands, and back all keep the poem close to the body, while `The Other Side` suggests that the real crossing here is not spiritual abstraction but contact with damage.

Claude

Hell rendered as a meeting place rather than a sentence - 'To meet you in hell / A place / where things / did not go well'. The poem strips away every conventional fixture and substitutes the clinical and the close-up: 'Incissions, the slightness / around things', a hall, someone 'frightened of vision'. Its center is 'just your wond, / that I have to put my hands to', where the spelling 'wond' (for wound) keeps the injury raw and unresolved, and the obligation to touch it is what traps the speaker. The final 'hard to twist your back to' leaves him facing the very thing he was meant to turn from, so the other side of the title is not the afterlife but the person already standing in it.