Six short lines, no punctuation, and a cosy idiom turned inside out: Dave Bonta's poem borrows the easy advice of its title, "going with the flow," then spends its few lines showing how hard that advice is for a mind that won't settle.
The first line is a flat statement: "the river is my mind." There is no "like" or "as", so the comparison is not a resemblance but an identity. The second line shows what kind of river this is: "night and day business not yet done." The missing punctuation lets the line read two ways. It could be "night and day, business not yet done," or "night and day business," a business that never closes. Either way, the word "business" is a clever choice. Rivers don't have business, but minds do: the to-do lists, worries and half-finished thoughts that keep running at three in the morning. The phrase "not yet done" holds a small irony, because "yet" promises completion, and a river never finishes. It only passes. The flow in the title therefore starts to sound less like relaxation and more like compulsion.
The second stanza changes mode. Statement gives way to instruction: "picture a hill." The speaker now talks to us, and what he asks us to imagine is something solid, the opposite of the moving river. Judging by the imagery, hill and river together make the stock ingredients of a landscape painting, and the next line confirms the idea of a made image: "picture a frame for the picture." The word "picture" appears twice in one line, first as a verb (imagine) and then as a noun (the image itself). The line folds back on itself, a picture inside a frame inside an act of picturing. A frame is also exactly what a river cannot have. To frame it you must stop it, so the poem stages the mind's attempt to hold its own movement still.
The last two lines hang off that sentence like loose threads: "of my itch / of a life." Grammatically they complete the phrase "the picture of my itch, of a life." Notice the small shift from "my" to "a," from private to general, as if the personal irritation were quietly becoming everyone's. The pairing is both funny and serious. An itch is tiny, physical and slightly embarrassing, while "a life" is the largest thing a poem can name. Setting them side by side deflates the grand word and dignifies the small one. Life becomes a persistent, unsatisfied need to scratch, which echoes the "business not yet done" of the opening. Nothing in the poem says the itch can ever be relieved.
The form supports this. There is no rhyme, and the lack of chiming suits a poem about things left unresolved, since nothing clicks shut at a line's end. Most words are plain monosyllables, so "the river is my mind" moves with an even, almost spoken beat. The second line is longer and more crowded, running on like a current. In the second stanza the lines swell and shrink: the brief "picture a hill," then the long, looping "picture a frame for the picture," then two clipped fragments. "Of my itch" ends on a hard "tch," a sound that almost scratches. Everything is lowercase, and the poem ends on "life" with no full stop. The speaker asks for a frame, yet the poem declines to put one around itself, leaving the river still running past its final word.
What makes the poem worth reading is how much it does in so little space. It takes a worn phrase and shows that "going with the flow" is a wish rather than a fact for a restless mind. It also seems to describe its own making. Writing a poem about the mind is itself a way of framing the river, an attempt to turn an itch into a picture. The poem knows the attempt can only be partial, and that gives it a wry honesty. It doesn't claim to have caught the river, only to have held up a frame for a moment while the water went on moving.