We hold intractable notions
\nof ourselves as agents
\nwith free will.
\nBut someone is what he is
\nand was what he was
\nand will be what he will be,
\nonce and forever.
\n
\nEven with time travel,
\nwe cannot change our past.
\nI am as I ever was,
\nsending out consistent stories
\ncapable of deception
\nbecause every trip through the gate
\nseems precisely the same;
\na neatly stacked quantum
\nof words scatters across
\na blackboard sky.
\n
\nThe arrow of time comes
\ndown to the fact that I can
\nmake an omelet from eggs
\nbut not eggs from
\nan omelet.
\n
\n <\/p>\n
Michael O\u2019Brien 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<\/em>. 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\u2019Brien.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" 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 [&hellip<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":1508,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[58],"class_list":["post-1506","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-poetry","tag-mike-obrien-photo-natalia-bratslavsky-dreamstime_"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/narrativenortheast.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1506","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/narrativenortheast.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/narrativenortheast.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/narrativenortheast.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/narrativenortheast.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1506"}],"version-history":[{"count":9,"href":"https:\/\/narrativenortheast.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1506\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1528,"href":"https:\/\/narrativenortheast.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1506\/revisions\/1528"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/narrativenortheast.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/1508"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/narrativenortheast.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1506"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/narrativenortheast.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1506"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/narrativenortheast.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1506"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}