Who Are You Talking to Now?

It’s sort of an odd dialogue,
Isn’t it, that of any one
Brain with the texts left by others?

The brain fantasizes the mind
Collectively generated,
Continuous conversation

Since the species started talking
And languages started living
Distributed among the skulls

And then, more rarely, here and there,
Anchored to patterns scraped on walls,
Into baked bricks, on turtle shells.

But to encounter a pattern
And imagine a persona
Reconstructed from memory

Of other patterns and other
Personas of breathing beings
Encountered more personally—

What a bizarre talent you have,
Reader! You assemble your ghosts
From collections of broken lines

And converse with us silently
Inside the caverns of your mind,
And who are we, these pattern ghosts,

More? The echoes of living thoughts
In particular living skulls,
Or of our own, earlier selves?