:D That is so long. I am laughing at myself right now. Sorry! I enjoy critiquing writing WAAY too much.

Nice to hear from your old self again. :) Seriously, though, I like the return to your old style. It's a strong poem, beautiful imagery, powerful punchline, all that I've come to expect from you. Now... here goes the nitpicking! :P There are a few places in this poem where I think you lose your easy rhythm, and I'm not sure why. Were you struggling with the rhyme in those places, or did you just not read it aloud before posting? For instance, "Collecting into a flood that seizes me" would read much more smoothly as "Collecting into a flood to seize me." The extra syllable in "seizes" messes with the rhyme to "leaves"; perhaps it is a more exact rhyme, but you of all people should understand my meaning in light of your easy flow between true rhyme and slant rhyme in your best work. Next, love your Michael Jackson Man in the Mirror reference. :) Favorite line: "So imperfect, so I'm perfect" You just have such a gift for seeing new words within words! Also, I always appreciate reading your thoughts as they meander through the concept of time, the future, impermanence. And there's your signature nod to the Divine--like it or not, it always shows up in your most heartfelt pieces. :) And a beautiful conclusion as always, which leads me back to the title--I love it. :) More big picture (and here I'm not sure how to word this, so please bear with my rambling thoughts), there's something I missed in my enjoyment of this poem, something of a faltering confidence that interfered with how much I usually LOVE your work. Like, I still loved it, but maybe in lowercase? :P Maybe it's just because it's shorter, and I think one of your biggest strengths in your best work is how you build momentum through several stanzas, so maybe it's just that it ended sooner than I had expected. But also, I feel like there are a lot of open-ended questions here, and I don't know that you answer all of them. Obviously, the point of those lines *is* to ask questions you don't have an answer to just yet, but it makes me wonder if maybe one of the things I have come to appreciate from your poetry that was somewhat lacking here is the answers you come up with. You tend to bring a new, insightful, status-quo-challenging perspective to old ideas in your writing, and that's a huge hook. It's what may leave me pondering a poem for days or what occasionally inspires me to send your work to a friend. It's when you say something so completely unprecedented that there is nothing coherent to answer back but "Wow." And to bring the rambling back to a semi-reasonable conclusion, perhaps it was the lack of surety and answers rather than questions that felt a touch off to me as I read. But regardless, kid, I loved it. Love, love, loved it, no doubt about it. Thanks for another gem.