Being carried along by your own thoughts is a familiar feeling, and lilgirlii's "The waves of my thoughts" turns it into a small, uneasy journey. The speaker drifts down a current that is oddly both waves and river, bumping into rocks and keeping company with garbage. Beneath the scenery sits a real question: if we are told we can be whatever we want to be, who is doing the being? The poem never answers it, and that refusal is the point.
The opening builds the mental landscape through touch rather than explanation. The rocks are "sharp and hard," three flat, heavy words that land like the bumps they describe, yet "some spots are covered with green moss." That small word "some" is honest: comfort exists, but only in patches. Then the vocabulary turns long and formal: "The assiduity of the never ending flow / The incessant onslaught of garbage." Assiduity normally means steady, diligent effort, something you would praise in a student. Applied to thoughts that will not stop, it turns sour, as if the mind were working overtime against its owner. The garbage also "floats along with me," so the unwanted thoughts are not invaders from outside. They travel in the same water.
Midway, the imagery stops and the poem starts arguing. "We are what we make ourselves to be / We can be whatever we want to be" sounds like a motivational poster, and the repeated "be" gives it a smooth, cheerful ring. The next lines puncture it. "Pressured imagination and creation" is the most telling phrase in the poem, because it suggests that self-invention is a demand rather than a freedom. The pronouns slide from "we" back to "I," as though the speaker tries on the general rule and then retreats to the personal case: "Did I make myself? Did I create myself?" The two questions are nearly identical, like someone knocking twice on a door that stays shut.
Nothing answers. "The rocks don't provide me with an answer / and the garbage just drifts." Then comes the strangest line: "So do I, simply float, my jaw held stiff." "So do I" puts the speaker level with the garbage, an unflattering comparison. "Simply float" promises ease, but the clenched jaw, the only bodily detail in the poem, contradicts it. The surface is calm and the tension is underneath, with words swallowed rather than spoken.
The ending turns water into glass. "The river is like a mirror / And I cut myself on its sharp edges." Rivers have banks, not edges, so the image shifts toward a shattered reflection: looking at yourself too hard becomes a way of getting hurt. The poem leaves the wound figurative, and judging by the text, it is the pain of self-examination that draws blood. The final lines are carefully delayed. "The blood leaves behind me, / a crimson trail" ends on a vivid picture, then spills into "Of uncertainty, of unknown." Dropping the article ("of unknown," not "of the unknown") leaves the phrase bare and unfinished. The trail is also the only thing the speaker clearly makes in the whole poem, which hints that the self, for now, is whatever gets left behind.
The form supports this. The poem is free verse, with no rhyme and no steady meter, and its lines swell and shrink like a current meeting obstacles. "Thoughts" closes both line one and line eight, so the first section loops back to its source. Soft sounds such as "float," "flow" and "crimson trail" carry the drifting, while hard monosyllables like "sharp and hard" jolt it.
What makes the poem worth reading is that it won't console. Many poems about identity end in a discovery, but this one ends on "unknown" and lets it stand. It also names a very current bind: the instruction to build yourself, and the fear that you can't tell whether you ever did.