We hold intractable notions
of ourselves as agents
with free will.
But someone is what he is
and was what he was
and will be what he will be,
once and forever.
Even with time travel,
we cannot change our past.
I am as I ever was,
sending out consistent stories
capable of deception
because every trip through the gate
seems precisely the same;
a neatly stacked quantum
of words scatters across
a blackboard sky.
The arrow of time comes
down to the fact that I can
make an omelet from eggs
but not eggs from
an omelet.
Michael O’Brien was born in Decatur, IL, went to local schools and earned a Ph.D. from the University of Illinois. He is a retired professor of English in the Petrocelli College of Fairleigh Dickinson University, Hackensack, NJ. He is the author of a poetry collection, Absence Implies Presence. His poems and reviews have appeared in The Literary Review, Lunch, Muse-Pie Press, Poet, Lips, Context South and numerous other journals. He has read his poetry throughout New Jersey and was featured at the William Carlos Williams Center in Rutherford and at the Geraldine R. Dodge Poetry Festival. He currently lives in Bloomingdale, NJ with his wife Moira Shaw O’Brien.
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