Against Imagination

The seduction of memory by language,
No Mephistopheles of any variation,
After all, without the naming power

To invent the name, Mephistopheles.
There’s your Faust. There’s your story.
There’s your magic dream of power.

We would like to be innocent. We invented
Innocence, as well as guilt and fantasy.
We are exactly those terms we invented.

But we aren’t. Words are forever
Something other than what we say we are,
Other than whatever you mean by us.

That’s what we are. We have to be lies
To work. The word for yesterday isn’t
Yesterday. Tomorrow isn’t real tomorrow.