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.
A leaner rewrite of the waking poem: 'It is not a nighmear, just a bad dream,' and 'Ya' got to think more even than three / When it comes to you more than twice.' The recurring props return - 'agood old cat in the corner,' the 'window of ware, reflecting / nothing' - alongside the disappearance of a former audience: 'when I was barely young they / would all come, now knowone would.' The instruction holds: 'get up and write, a line,. be careful / and do it slow as if it is the wilderness,' because at night 'That is why you wake up.'