By Jack Joseph Smith
Original Scan
AI Interpretation
A bad dream demands feline attention, while a seeing window that reflects nothing keeps watching, and country hawks, city hogs, and COPIES mix into the page's survival logic.
The command to listen gives the bad dream practical weight, like advice for getting through a dangerous hour rather than an invitation to interpret symbols. The cat in the corner suggests watchfulness without panic, a domestic version of feral patience. That strange window sees without reflecting, so the world becomes something observed by surfaces as much as by people, and the final COPIES note leaves the page with a blunt archival echo.
A still shorter third take on the same poem: 'You have to listen, a bad dream,' 'Ya' got to think more than even three,' the 'good old cat in the corner,' and the defiant 'I don't care if they hear me.' The seeing 'window of ware; reflecting nothing, / but it certainly sees what it wants' keeps its uncanny one-way watchfulness, and the closing pairs 'the country hawk's / and hogs' with 'the city street helps me.' A standalone handwritten 'COPIES' at the foot reads as a working note rather than part of the poem. This reading is provisional because the band is 'mixed.'