You don’t need
a Ketamine drip
to talk to God
or a fifth of Jack
to take back
what’s rightfully yours.
Psychedelics
are a “rabbit hole”
to another dimension.
But what’s on the other side?
A conjuring
of your own mind
like a flying bus
or dragon
you can tame and ride?
Or how about
a terraformed planet,
pledged with the green blood
of “little green men,”
a megalomaniacal vivisection
in exchange for earthly bodies
to hide in plain sight?
Or something more ominous
like demons disguised
as angels of light?
Godspeed
if you’ve dropped your keys,
hat or hash pipe
into the “rabbit hole”
of delusive fantasy,
whirling and writhing down
an eternal abyss of insanity,
further and further away
from the drain of objective reality.
Alice’s quest to find answers
in Wonderland
is as promising as Sylvia Plath
resurrected to find faith and sobriety
at the next Burning Man.
So what should we make
of the Cheshire Cat’s quote
“Imagination is the only weapon
in the war against reality”?
Is imagination and reality
really at “war”?
Or is this just an incendiary claim
aimed at unsuspecting children
used to settle a personal score?
Don’t we understand
the more
we seek to escape
from the subterranean structure
of what’s real,
we become our own mercenaries
and steal our own joy
at being authentically
whom we were designed to be
in the presence of a real
life-and-blood deity?
All the while,
missing character-building opportunities
hidden along the road
of a razor-sharp reality.
Lewis Carroll,
ironically and unwittingly,
swallowed the sea
and choked on the apothecary’s
(Morpheus’s) metaphysical prescription
of the “red pill,”
remaining content
under the spell
of ignorance
from Goethe’s conviction,
“Few people have the imagination for reality.”
So are we the philosophical few
or those who view
the debate as an either/or fallacy?
Aren’t we called to gather and sew
opposed to those who tear
and pluck the grey hairs
from the braided fabric
of the quintessential freedom
to suffer in ecstasy?
Imagination is a gift from above
but not at the expense
of the space-time continuum
called love.