Thoughts, the poem announces in its first line, "make men strangers", and the rest of it shows how. A thought wakes you at night and sends you reaching for a cigarette. The only cure is to lie back and think it all the way through: "that's the only way for it to die!" The exclamation mark is the loudest moment in the poem, a small burst of triumph over insomnia. The title looks like a date stamp, and that suits the poem, which reads like a diary entry: one mind on one restless night, sorting through its own traffic.
What follows is a comic anatomy of guilt, grudge and mortality. Warsh keeps puncturing solemnity with domestic or absurd detail. The death of a thought, he says, isn't "wholesome / like coming home from school for a glass of milk / and cookies". He sets up a childhood comfort only to deny it. Guilt arrives in dreams as "pictures / of saints and rabbinical figures / lighting big cigars." The image is funny and unsettling at once, holy authority turned into a smoking cartoon. The cigars also echo the cigarette of the first stanza, as if the waking habit has leaked into sleep.
The third stanza, the longest, begins with deadpan exaggeration: a thought bends the speaker backwards until he tips over his chair and breaks "a few vertebrae". Then the poem stumbles on purpose, or seems to, with the odd comma in "harsh, colors", and the line trips just as the speaker's mind does. Out of this mess comes a real insight. Bad thoughts about people who betrayed you "mean you still love them." If you cover that over by calling hate "simply the bent of human nature", those people will "strike back / with conviction and ire / like names printed in black letters / across the front of a tabloid." The repressed thought becomes public scandal. Note the echo between "bends me backwards" and "the bent of human nature", as though thinking itself warps the body and the character.
Formally, the poem is free verse with no rhyme and no regular meter. It runs on long, conversational sentences that spill across line breaks and sometimes seem to lose their footing. This is the form's quiet argument. The poem doesn't describe playing a thought through; it does it, wandering and doubling back. The word "thought" returns again and again, almost to the point of obsession. The similes also drift further from their subjects. Thoughts are "weighed and pocketed like enzymes", and revenge is "bile swallowed and spat out across / your neighbor's fence", a suburban boundary for a violent feeling. The past becomes "a crowd of animals passing up a ramp / onto an ark floating out to sea / like a man speaking his own defense". One way to read this is that memory is saved but adrift, and every recollection is also a bit of self-justification.
The fifth and sixth stanzas turn toward death, and the questions grow stranger. "What's in a death but your thoughts while dying?" leads to "What's in your heart / but someone thinking?" Feeling and thinking can't be pulled apart, which explains why a bitter thought about a betrayer proves love. Then the ending changes the temperature. The best thoughts are "serene, / that advocate no stance, tolerate only the moment, / and flow to the source, unconcerned, like a caress." After tabloids, bile and broken vertebrae, "caress" is the first gentle simile in the poem, and the long, slow sentence seems to relax with it.
The poem matters because it takes something everyone does and almost no one examines, and it treats it with humor and honesty. It also ends with a pleasing irony. Its ideal is a thought that asks for nothing, yet it gets there only by working through thoughts that ask for everything. Its calm is earned, which makes it more convincing.