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By Jack Joseph Smith
By Jack Joseph Smith
Original Scan
AI Interpretation
I got To Get Up strips the earlier exhortation down to a cleaner argument: a bad dream is not a nightmare, and waking exists so a careful line can be written.
The opening correction matters because it refuses melodrama and makes the speaker more disciplined. Thinking more even than three suggests a vigilance beyond easy counting or ordinary reason. The cat, the window, and the vanished audience all return, but now they serve a single purpose: get up, write, and understand why waking happens.
Companion revision: 'think more even than three' when it comes to you more than twice; the whining cat; the window of ware; the same injunction to write a line slow, as if in wilderness, and remember at night why you wake up.