Nothing in these eight lines mentions a stomach, and that is the first clue. The title names a small, ordinary, physical complaint, yet the poem is about the moment of waking and the dread that comes with it. The speaker never says what is wrong. The poem suggests that the trouble is the kind of anxiety or heaviness that settles in the body before the mind has found words for it. "Stomach ache" is also a child's phrase, and it fits the closing wish to "go back." The poem hints at someone who wants the simplicity of retreat, though it never says where "back" is.
The central idea is that consciousness itself has become the problem. The first stanza reads like a chain reaction in which every step of waking leads to a worse one. Wake up, "start thinking," "stay up," "open my eyes," "dry up my tears." Each line hinges on a mid-line "and," and what follows it undoes what came before. Opening your eyes should mean seeing clearly, but here it means you "get lost." Drying your tears sounds like relief, yet the verb "dry up" also suggests a well running empty, and the result is that you "be locked." Feeling has not been healed. It has been shut in.
The second stanza turns to the advice a tired person is usually given: "stay positive and look up, / be self aware and give up." The grammar is cruel. "Stay positive" and "be self aware" are respectable goals, but the poem sets them beside "give up," so that self-awareness seems to lead straight to defeat. The whole poem also sits under the opening "I dont want to." Read strictly, the speaker rejects even the healthy things on the list. One possible reading is that the speaker is worn out by the effort of performing hope, not only by sadness.
The word "up" holds the poem together. It ends five of the eight lines: "wake up," "stay up," "look up," "give up," and again "wake up." It also hides inside "dry up." In English, "up" usually means rising and improving, but here it keeps drifting toward finishing and surrendering. The direction that should mean getting better becomes a word for running out. The one line that breaks the pattern is "I just want to go back...", which ends on "back" and a trailing ellipsis, as if the sentence has no energy to finish. "Lost," "locked" and "back" are also linked by their hard l and k sounds, a loose echo in place of a clean rhyme. The effect is of a mind circling the same few sounds.
The rhythm is short and plain. Almost every line has six or seven syllables, and they are closely matched. This gives the poem a steady, pacing quality, like someone repeating the same worry. There is no full stop anywhere. The lines pile up on commas and then simply end, so nothing is ever resolved. The poem also loops, because the last line repeats the first. The speaker has traveled through a whole morning's thoughts and arrived exactly where they began. Even the capitalization is telling. The poem opens in lowercase, "i dont," like a half-whispered message. By the last two lines it has become "I," which could read as a voice growing slightly firmer, though it is hard to say whether this is deliberate.
What makes the poem significant is its restraint. It does not explain the cause of the speaker's feelings, and it does not offer a consoling ending or a turn toward hope. It lets the reader recognize something they may have felt themselves, the reluctance to begin the day because beginning means thinking. Its plain language and repeated word make that feeling easy to enter. It is also honest about the gap between advice and experience, since "stay positive" sounds easy until it sits next to "give up." In eight short lines, the poem treats an ache that has no obvious source as real enough to deserve a poem.