A Manual Fiction Manual

In the future, imagination
Will be crafted entirely by guilds
Of hereditary artisans

Who draw fantastic fictions by hand
And are forbidden by caste and trade
From ever alluding to their lives

In any way in what they create.
All fantasies will be customized
For those with enough income to pay.

Those without the means of purchasing
Their own imagination will go
Down to the docks, the squalid alleys,

Where pickpockets and the disgruntled
Hawk knockoffs and black market copies
Of the stained glass from the palaces

And the tales kept chained in libraries,
Sheets ripped from the private troves of dreams
Held down in the cellars of the priests,

Taboo autobiographical
Doodles of addicted and disgraced
Guild members with nowhere else to go.

And if future imagination
Appears suspiciously familiar,
Bear in mind future’s from pasts you know.