By Jack Joseph Smith
Original Scan
AI Interpretation
The Laborer defends craft against accusations of irresponsibility, joining money, tools, dreamwork, back, earth, and sky until labor becomes a way of being watched back.
Knowing what millionaires know does not liberate the speaker into comfort; it only sharpens the suspicion that practical knowledge is being misread. Alone with any tool, the worker enters a private intelligence where brain, back, and circumstance answer to one another. The dream becomes credible because it looks back at him, and that mutual gaze extends upward when the sky begins watching too.
'The Laborer' answers a charge of irresponsibility: 'You think because I know what those / who have a million dollars know,. / that I am irresponsible.' The reply is to 'make it a poem / Quadtriple the circumstance,' to work where 'his brain / has its own way,. cause alone / with any tool, after awhile / you always see.' Pride stays modest - 'The modest amout I have done' - and turns reciprocal: 'I felt the dream, and I liked / the dream watching me,' a mutual gaze that extends upward as 'the sky watches you so hard' and the handwritten 'To have' presses the worker to 'get that part too.'