Quantum Entanglement

Who was it that said rub
the sticks of your bad luck together
and make a little fire out of them?
Well then, why not an all-out conflagration,
a let's-burn-you-down-to-the-cinders so there's 
no hope of it coming back (the bad luck, I mean)? 
People are always starting memes or conversations 
with questions like What should your future 
self have said to your past self at a time
when you might have most needed it? I can think 
of more than one of those times when I was young 
and timid, easily intimidated but scrambling 
to quickly put on some costume of bravado. 
My future self should have told that past self 
Look, kid, it gets better or You don't have 
to get hitched to make a life you can call 
your own. And when the girl that was me was told 
by a man Don't pretend you don't know what I want, 
my future self should have said through her mouth 
Why don't you fuck all the way off? In this life,
we're lucky to get a glimpse of something trifling
in the moment that later turns out to be (in hindsight) 
important. Like the time this girl in a sci-fi series 
we were watching says if she'd stayed home instead 
of taken the trash to the end of the road, her house, 
and her mother inside that house, might still be 
around instead of being disappeared into some kind of 
wormhole. It turns out the mother didn't really want 
to be a mother. And children always think it must be 
their fault. Perhaps the girl lingered too long after
school, mouth open and entranced by trees along the way 
spangled with icicles, determined to see if each drop 
tasted different. Perhaps the mother wanted to go 
to conservatory, train her voice into a sweet soprano. 
Or she wanted to master theoretical physics and quantum 
entanglement, calculating correlations that persist  
across light years and distances. In theory,  
manipulating entangled particles can help alter 
a particle's past state. Think of your future 
self taking your child self's hand in your own, 
both of you walking into a winter night, little 
dendrite flakes suspended for a moment, looking 
as though they could be falling either down or up.