The Uses of Imagination

"Everything is much simpler
In a hospital, including
The jokes," Hemingway once wrote
From limited experience.

He was busier boxing,
Boozing, and making common cause
With bullfighters, fishermen,
And six-toed kittens in the Keys.

So I've read. But of all that,
The snows of Kilimanjaro,
The hills like white elephants,
Moveable feasts of friends and wives,

I like his hospital best.
Write what you know, read what you know
Better, complain whoever
Knows you best knows you not at all.

Nothing is simpler inside
The sorts of places where one lives
With imprisoning routines
That force thoughts into other thoughts.

The celebrated tellers
Of stories benefit from lack
Of imagination. Poems
Suffer mad creativity

That keeps them in hospitals,
Prisons, and office cubicles.
Humorless often as not.
But free to terrify blank hours.