Beautiful, deep and sublime. Leaves me feeling wistful - you speak to all my shattered parts and possible realities.

As ever, I love your choice of phrase, your use of word play.

"Shedding layers of skin like a sinuous snake" has particularly sibilant, alliterative, extremely appealing use of onomatopoeic device which pleases me greatly.

I am also rather fond of the word "mellifluous" which rolls around the mouth in a pleasantly sensuous way.

I want to highlight all of this. It's difficult to pick out the most effective phrases.

I've often thought myself that the concept of free will only really gives us choice between pre-set alternatives - and as such it is possible to believe in both determinism/Fate and free-will. Our lives are set out before us like a network of roads/veins/branches, we have choices where there are forks and junctions, but passage is for the most part one way, like the flow of blood circulating that Life around our bodies.

So our lives wash along in the river of time and all we can do is continue that struggle to be ourselves, even as we seem to conform to time's set patterns by aging, losing our fertility and virility.

Yet, regardless of how we feel we are perceived, or the roles we are playing, it is all still open to personal choice.

I think you (general, as a person) are individual, as well as being part of the collective. That seems counter to possibility, yet also completely possible. We are individual, complex, dualities who are also part of our societies, cultures and humanity as a whole.

I also think/feel through reading your writing that you ('Arthur', the author) are beautifully unique - and not everyone does manage that, not at all.

It's wonderful to see you have a new poem published and I truly enjoyed reading it - even though the melancholy and uncertainty bleeds through in quite a strong undercurrent, for which I'm sending back empathy and concern.