Untitled ("My body is upstairs all the time")

By Jack Joseph Smith

My body is upstairs all the time I refuse to go gown on myself When I bend down to pick up an acorn I saw forget it Sometimes I wish I had a wild sea in front of me But then I might leave Yeah, I am not a dreamer so maybe I would Now I know that they have nothing to worry about downtown But I told them I had another bank I led them around about a city or two I just said I heard these bigger banks like digging in to the smaller ones, and then did a shoulder thing, and walked out

Original Scan

Page 27

AI Interpretation

GPT

A poem of bodily refusal and hustling wit, shifting from private discomfort into a sly meditation on money and escape.

Claude

The body confined upstairs while the mind moves freely — the poem begins with this split and never heals it. Hustling wit is the mind's compensation for the body's immobility.

The phrase 'all the time' transforms a temporary condition into permanent state. The body is always upstairs, making the upstairs itself a kind of sentence.