Letter to an Archaeologist

Citizen, enemy, mama's boy, sucker, utter
garbage, panhandler, swine, refujew, verrucht;
a scalp so often scalded with boiling water
that the puny brain feels completely cooked.
Yes, we have dwelt here: in this concrete, brick, wooden
rubble which you now arrive to sift.
All our wires were crossed, barbed, tangled, or interwoven.
Also: we didn't love our women, but they conceived.
Sharp is the sound of pickax that hurts dead iron;
still, it's gentler that what we've been told or have said ourselves.
Stranger! move carefully through our carrion:
what seems carrion to you is freedom to our cells.
Leave our names alone. Don't reconstruct those vowels,
consonants, and so forth: they won't resemble larks
but a demented bloodhound whose maw devours
its own traces, feces, and barks, and barks. 

 -Joseph Brodsky

With this poem, Joseph Brodsky describes a letter from an ancient people to an archaeologist that is digging up their remains. He dwells on assumptions that the man would make, like "All our wires were crossed, barbed, tangled, or interwoven./Also: we didn't love our women, but they conceived". It feels like the speaker is criticizing the archaeologist with the first few lines, "Citizen, enemy, mama's boy, sucker, utter/garbage, panhandler, swine, refujew, verrucht;/a scalp so often scalded with boiling water/that the puny brain feels completely cooked." which attacks them ferocisioously. The message of the poem seems to be that when arcaeologists discover ancient bones and make assumptions about those people, they are completely wrong because they didn't live in that time, and have no right to assume anything about the people.

Literary Devices:
The speaker is speaking from the dead - Apostrophe