The poem is short and strange, and it works more by suggestion than by plain statement. It opens with summer imagined as a cook, someone who chops, heats and transforms things. The title, "Slice and dice," fits that picture: summer cuts the world into pieces. Then the speaker turns inward and says their own eyes are "poor company," which hints at tiredness, dullness, or an inability to take in what is around them.
The speaker then addresses "you my ache," so the pain itself becomes a companion. This ache "understood the blade," as if it already knew what cutting feels like. The last lines picture someone "dancing naked to know / the nature of lives," an image of being exposed and unguarded in order to understand something true about living.
The mood is raw and quietly intense. Pain and heat sit side by side with a kind of reckless honesty. The poem seems to suggest that suffering, however sharp, can teach us what lives are made of.