Second thoughts are usually private, but "I'd Thought" stages one live. The speaker begins with confidence in the past perfect ("I'd thought that I'd thought it out well"), then undermines it in the next line, and by the third decides to start over in public: "I think I'll think again aloud." All that comes with the poem is the username reedjoseph7, so the evidence here is the text itself. What the text shows is a mind that wants to be organised but keeps getting pulled off course by its own words. Its central idea is that thinking is messy, and that the more we try to manage it, the more it trips us up.
The opening stanza builds that mess into its structure. Line 1 ends on "well" and line 2 begins with "Well," as if the speaker has caught himself mid-sentence and changed direction. The same hand-off happens across the stanza break, where "come on out" becomes "Come out." Each repetition feels like a mind picking up a loose thread and following it, so the poem enacts the thinking it describes. There is also a lovely near-pun in "aloud" and "allow," which sound almost the same. Speaking and permitting merge: to think aloud is to allow thoughts out. The rhyme of "aloud" with "out" is imperfect, which suits a speaker who admits his first attempt wasn't flawless.
The second stanza speeds up. Every line ends in "-action" (action, attraction, distractions, subtractions), so the rhyme becomes a drumbeat with nowhere else to go. That suits the subject. The speaker is "late for the latest great attraction," and the clustered L sounds in "late" and "latest" make the phrase tumble forward in a rush. Then comes "Distracted by these great distractions," where the word "great" has now appeared twice and the distraction is getting out of hand. The stanza ends on a small joke in arithmetic: "Multiplied by substantial subtractions." Multiplication should make things bigger and subtraction smaller, so the line leaves the reader unsure whether the mind is gaining or losing. Judging by the logic of the line, it is doing both at once, which is exactly what distraction feels like.
In the third stanza the poem turns to advice, or something dressed up as advice. "Attract the best, repel the lessor" sets opposites side by side, and the spelling "lessor," a word that in dictionaries means someone who leases property, may be a slip for "lesser" or a deliberate pun; the text alone doesn't settle it. Either way, it rhymes with "professor" and seeds a chain of echoes: "lessor," "Unless," "less impressive." The professor also "professes," so the title and the verb share a root, and authority is being made to sound like a performance. The stanza's lines stretch as it goes, with the last one the longest, so the poem ends on a long, slightly weary sigh. And the final claim is deflating. The coming "tests and trials" will be "less impressive than what was already said." The future shrinks, and the last word, "said," sends us back to the speaker who decided to think aloud in the first place. The poem ends where it began, a loop rather than a conclusion.
That circularity is the poem's most interesting feature. The tenses move from past ("I'd thought") to present and future ("I think I'll think") and finally to a prediction ("will be"), yet no progress is made. The mind has acted, been distracted, taken advice and ended up repeating itself.
What makes the poem worth reading is its honesty about overthinking. It is light and playful, built from sound-play and puns, but the playfulness is the point. By letting rhyme and repetition steer the thinking, the poem shows how a mind can be led by its own language as much as it leads it. For a student, it is a useful example of form carrying meaning: the tangled sounds are the tangled thoughts.