Anyone who has been told to "go and find yourself" will recognise the target of Dave Bonta's "(note to self)". The poem treats that advice as a kind of hunt, then tells the hunter to stop. Its central idea is that the self is not something you can pursue and corner. The more eagerly you chase it, the more it scatters, and the neat, finished identity you hope to capture may be a ruin anyway.
The title sets up the tone. Putting it in brackets makes the poem feel like a private aside, a scrap of paper we have caught the speaker writing for himself. Every line is an imperative ("don't be", "consider", "stop trying"), but the person being ordered about is the speaker. That gives the poem a wry intimacy. It reads less like a lecture than like someone arguing himself out of a bad habit.
The first image carries the main argument. The deer "rolls her eye in panic / at your approach", birds "take flight", and the rabbit's pelt "quivers". All three animals respond to being approached, and the vocabulary is the vocabulary of stalking: "approach", "pelt", "eager". The poem never says the speaker is a hunter, but the animals behave as if he were. The detail that makes it vivid is the deer's rolling eye, where we see the white of fear, followed by the rabbit's skin trembling. Panic shows in the body before any thought. Seen this way, the self-seeker's eagerness is not harmless. It is a pressure that makes the thing he wants run away.
The second stanza turns on a sly piece of syntax. "Consider the possibility / that they're right about you" leaves "they" unnamed, but the animals we have just seen are the obvious candidates. Then comes "those whom we trust to predict earthquakes". With no punctuation to steady it, the line can be read as a description of the animals, since there is an old popular belief that creatures sense tremors before people do. That reading is an inference, but it fits the poem. If the animals flee because they sense an earthquake, then the earthquake is the speaker. His restless searching is the tremor, and the creatures read it correctly. It is an unflattering idea, and the poem asks us to "consider the possibility" rather than insisting on it.
The last stanza shifts from the landscape to the page. "Stop trying to dot your i's" is a pun, since the lowercase "i" is also the pronoun that the whole poem has been circling. Dotting your i's means finishing, tidying and fixing an identity in place. The poem then turns the letters into architecture: "broken columns / from a Greek temple". An "i" is a vertical stroke, so it looks like a column. The self, once completed, is imagined as a ruin "where no one now remembers / the name of the god". The word "now" matters here, because it gives the ruin a long history. The final image is deliberately open. Whatever the self was once organised around has been forgotten, and polishing the remains will not bring it back.
The form supports all of this. The poem has no rhyme and no regular metre, and its lines are short and conversational. Its stanzas run one line, four, three, four, so the opening command stands alone, almost like a title for what follows. It has no punctuation and no capital letters, which gives it the sound of thought rather than a polished statement. The lack of punctuation also lets the earthquake line lean in two directions at once. The end of the poem slows down with its short, heavy lines ("the name of the god"), so it feels as if the speaker has finally stopped moving.
What makes the poem worth reading is that it argues against self-improvement in a form that avoids preaching. It gives no advice about how to be a self. It suggests that grasping at identity is clumsy and a little violent, and that the sense of being whole may be a fiction left over from older certainties. In fourteen or so lines, it makes the restless search for the self look less like a heroic quest than like a person crashing through a wood, wondering why nothing will stay still.