I wondered once while still a curious child
of who I was before I was, because
I listened to those people on T.V.
speak wondrously of who they were before.
They'd found a way to cause remembrance,
under hypnosis, where by regressing
back and farther past their very birth,
and nine months farther back beyond the meet
of ***** and egg, and years more farther back,
they could describe the people that they were.
I wondered who I was before I was,
until one day I read a certain news,
a scientific study done to see
the people who some people truly were.
One hundred people hypnotized did see
their lives before the lives which they now lived.
And forty-eight were Abraham Lincoln.
I closed the newspaper and took a walk,
and never more subscribed to idle talk.

(C)2014, Christos Rigakos