Fantasy’s Disability

Change you can’t experience
Constrains imagination.
Without useful memories

To drag out, cut up, and quilt,
The story starts from nothing,
Or it would if stories could.

All the supernatural
Tales involve retelling life
On the far side of living,

Make unknown transformations,
As from living awareness
Past the end of awareness,

Known aspects of life welded
To counterfactual traits—
The ability to float

In the air reimagined
From floating in water, or
Passing through walls as you’ve passed

Through fog—pretending they’re true
Of what can’t be remembered.
Weakness and limitation,

Thought’s incapacities, not
Creative fecundity,
Imagine alterity.