Anyone who has ever wondered how they ended up with their particular friends will recognise the question buried in "children of our choice." The poem asks how much of our social world we actually pick, and how much simply happens to us. Its answer is unsettling. The word "choice" appears again and again, but by the end it is hard to tell who is doing the choosing.
The poem is built like a chain. Each line picks up the last word of the line before and makes it the start of the next: "circles of friends. / friends of choice. / those choices devour our life with chance of fate / fate is only based on time and time of when / when your there with people / and people who are there with you." The effect is a little like a conversation in which every sentence grabs the previous speaker's final word and pushes it somewhere new. Rhyme is absent, but the repetition does a rhyme's job, binding the lines together and giving the poem momentum. It also drags the reader along a path of logic. Circles lead to friends, friends to choice, choice to fate, fate to time, time to "when," and "when" to people. By the end we have travelled from a social group to a matter of pure timing.
The middle of that chain is where the poem's thinking happens. "Those choices devour our life with chance of fate" is the most crowded line, and its vocabulary fights with itself. "Devour" is a surprisingly violent verb for something as ordinary as picking friends, as if choices were hungry things that consume the person who makes them. "Chance" and "fate" are close to opposites, since one means randomness and the other means design, yet here they sit side by side. The poem seems to say that we can't separate them. The next line settles the matter in an almost deflating way: fate is "only based on time and time of when." Fate, which sounds grand, is reduced to timing. Then the poem gets plain: "when your there with people / and people who are there with you." Being "there" is a shared, mutual thing, and nobody in that line is shown deciding anything. (The "your" for "you're" is probably a slip, though it fits a poem so interested in what belongs to whom.)
The repeated word "only" does quiet work too. The children are "involved in only circles," and fate is "only based on" time. Both uses narrow things down. A circle is a comforting shape, with no one left out and nothing missing, but it is also a closed one. "Involved" carries the same double meaning, since it can mean taking part or being tangled up in something. The poem never says which it prefers.
The structure repeats this idea. The opening three lines come back almost unchanged at the end, so the poem finishes where it started, like the circles it describes. There is one small change, though. The first time, the circles are "circles of friends"; the second time, they are "circles of our choice." The poem has been through its whole argument about chance and timing, and then it ends on the word "choice" anyway. This can be read two ways. It might be a bitter irony, with people insisting they chose what was really arranged by circumstance. Or it might be a kind of acceptance, a decision to claim the circle as ours whatever put us in it. The text supports both, and that openness is part of its strength.
The title adds another twist. The refrain says "children of our time," but the title says "children of our choice." Time and choice are treated as two names for the same force, and the title quietly asks which of them we really belong to.
What makes the poem worth reading is how closely its form follows its subject. It claims that our lives run in circles, and then it runs in a circle. It claims that choice and chance can't be pulled apart, and its lines can't be pulled apart either, because each depends on the last. For a short, unadorned piece in lowercase with plain words, it manages something larger: it makes an everyday fact, that we are shaped by the people who happen to be near us, feel strange and a little dizzying.