A slogan sits above these twelve lines, but nothing beneath it sounds like one. "Get woke stay woke" is an order, and a familiar one, urging alertness. The poem never explains the phrase. It spends four tercets showing how hard, and how strange, being awake actually is.
It begins with a picture rather than an argument. "Light found a little table / with one joint of meat / and dressed it in gold." The scene is almost a still life: a humble table, a single cut of meat, and light that acts like a person, arriving unasked and doing the dressing. Beauty here is a gift, not an achievement, and the word "meat" keeps it earthly and mortal. Gold is falling on something that will be eaten, and that quiet hint of transience gives the loveliness its edge.
The second stanza turns to the speaker, and the tone becomes confessional. "I would've been glad to doubt all things" admits a wish for the safer stance, since doubt would at least be a settled position. But the next line overrules it: "joy is great in me." The comparison that follows is the poem's most surprising move: joy is great "like the fear of death in a king." We expect joy to be likened to something warm. Instead it is likened to the dread of a man who has everything to lose. The simile suggests that this joy is huge, involuntary and tinged with fear, something the speaker is possessed by rather than something he possesses. The plain, mostly one-syllable words make the line sound more like an admission than a flourish.
The third stanza makes that precariousness physical. "Under my yes the sand may give way" turns "yes" into a structure standing on unstable ground. The image may recall the biblical house built on sand, though the poem doesn't say so. Affirmation is risky, and the speaker knows it. Then comes the action: "I open my window God help me." With no punctuation, the prayer slides out of the sentence mid-breath, half oath and half plea. What the window shows is "unsufferable torment." The odd, old-fashioned "unsufferable" is more arresting than the usual "insufferable." It carries the sense of something that cannot be borne, and perhaps also something that should not be allowed. The golden table is indoors, and the window leads somewhere else.
The last stanza offers the closest thing to an answer, and it is deliberately modest: "not to speak but to stay present / after a rupture / with the usual ease and sleep." The syntax can be read two ways. The rupture may be a break *with* ease and sleep, a refusal to go back to comfort. Or the speaker may be trying to stay present *after* a break, while ease and sleep keep offering themselves again. Either way, the title's "woke" finds its opposite in "sleep," and the poem admits how appealing sleep is. Notice too that the goal is "not to speak." Presence is valued above commentary, which quietly criticises the idea that being aware means announcing it.
Formally, the poem is free verse with no rhyme and no punctuation at all. Without full stops, the stanzas flow like thoughts, and the gaps between them, with no connecting words, work like small ruptures of their own. We are never told how the gold table, the king's fear, the sand and the window relate, so we have to hold them together, which is what the speaker is trying to do.
That is where the poem's significance lies. It takes a phrase that can sound like a badge and turns it into a lived difficulty: to be awake is to feel joy and horror in the same body, in the same room, with the window open. The poem does not resolve this or reassure us. It asks only that we stay, and in twelve short lines it makes that request feel both frightening and worth answering.