How to Haunt Signs

You’ve got nothing to work with
But shared, inherited words—
Even our patterns aren’t yours,

Not hardly. And yet you know,
From listening and reading
And attending to others,

That persons inhabit words
As faintly distinctive ghosts,
As peculiarities,

Even, sometimes, as ideas.
Oh, that’s just what they would say,
That’s so typical of them,

And then you use more old words,
More inherited phrases
To discuss someone’s strangeness.

Thus we’re your commentary
On ourselves, mostly banal,
By your ghosts within our walls,

Except that our walls were built
By your ghosts that move through them,
Confined to haunt us, your signs.