The Imaginer

I once heard someone say:
“I am very imaginative, it’s fun,
But in all seriousness,
That isn’t worth very much”

And I thought: How did we get here?

Somewhere, at some point, somebody imagined
That a thought is separate from the imagination
And thus imagined a hierarchy
Where thought became king
And imagination its infantile servant –
Cute, but
Unnecessary

Such rational hubris
Gave rise to a dull factocracy
With dimly lit fact-orat-ories
Grey buildings lined with concrete statues
Of Our Masters of Maturity
Depicted as an adult male in a suit with his eyes gauged out
Our holy man of bureaucratic correctness selling you security in exchange for your essence
You can’t aspire to be like him
You can only achieve his status by reliquishing all creative agency
And undoing yourself from aspiration altogether
By un-spiriting yourself
And dutifully committing your life to the mechanic blandness of intellectual control-rooms

And to every vivid sparkly weirdness that anyone dares to utter in your presence you will speak the mandatory adage:
“That’s not realistic”
“No”
“That’s just not realistic”

All this remains a perpetual plague of confusion
Warped into lifelong inferiority complexes
In every dreamy child there ever was
[Yes, that means every child there ever was]

Oh My God
We managed to create hell in paradise
We have management teams for that
(And they collect our taxes)
An astonishing accomplishment
…when you stop to think about it

What’s the imagination worth
If not our entire sense of past and future
How we conceive our selves, our world
And every relationship

We live in the imagined future of those that came before us
We imagine our selves and each other into evolutionary motion, together
The dream preceding destiny

Notice the implicit responsibility therein
To imagine far and wide and very well
For the sake of everything that’s still possible