The You

If you’ve got even a decade
Or two of memories to pull,

Feel for the strangeness of the cloth—
The sense you didn’t live those lives

That were lived in another world
Discarded by now. Replicants,

Everyone. Just because no one
Deliberately planted those dreams

Of a you in a childhood world,
Of you in a blurred adulthood,

Doesn’t mean they’re any more real.
Dripping gold afternoons or dark,

Cold alleyways, kind eyes or cruel,
Your past never happened to you.