By Jack Joseph Smith
Original Scan
AI Interpretation
The speaker asks why a man selling images failed to understand how an intellect formed on the street could make people identify his fame with their own dreams.
The speaker describes persuasion through fame and personal identification. The question concerns the image-seller's failure to recognize that process; it does not identify him or explain his business.
The poem is one long question: why a man whose business was to convince 'people that it was worth it to / pay for images' did not understand that a stubborn intellect from the street would soften people into believing his fame was 'an identifying part of / their own dream?'
The single question turns on the gap between selling images and an audience's wish to find its own dream in someone else's fame. Its prose-like lines read as a note to self rather than a lyric, and the figure remains unnamed.