IF YOU DON'T TAKE THE RISK, JUMP THE ABYSS LIKE A FIREFLY

IF YOU DON’T TAKE THE RISK, JUMP THE ABYSS LIKE A FIREFLY

If you don’t take the risk, jump the abyss like a firefly

between two polarities, how are you ever going

to release your potential as the stem cell of a bridge of light

from one hemisphere of your brain of starmud

to the other side of your shining? Whenever

there are two eyes it’s crucial that you make a third.

And if you haven’t got the courage to jump from your artificial paradise

without knowing whether you’ve got a parachute on or not,

go ask the dandelions gone to seed how to take a fall

like the free radical of a kiss on the breeze, touch life

lightly as if you were feeling the weave of the silk mist

rising like someone’s last breath off the morning lake

or ask the seasoned helicopter pilots of the dragonflies

and maple keys about doing double wheelies like dna helices

when you’ve driven way past the end of the road like Thelma and Louise

and your animation’s been suspended trying to cling

to the wind like a rafter of air you can hang from

like the larva of a caterpillar repelling down a Dutch elm

on a thread of fate you’ve got to pull like a rip cord

if you want to be a skydiver instead of a half-baked butterfly

always on the run from base-jumping spiders

on a strafing run of balsa wood gliders that never got off the ground.

If you don’t jump into this life like Basho’s frog

into the pond of the world. Splash. At the end of time

when your life flashes before your eyes like an implosion

going supernova, just before you drown in your own tears,

you’re going to realize that all along you were

an estranged embryo that committed suicide in the womb

by making a noose of your mother’s umbilical cord.

How wide does the sky have to be before you’ll fly?

Or the sea, to swim? You want to know the flightplan

and the wingspan of the wind before you decide

if you’re going to ride it or not, dig your spurs into the storm

like white lightning into the heart of a brahma bull

or run before it like a rodeo clown who wanted to be a matador.

All my life I’ve run into cosmic matchbooks

with a solar flare for bucolating back on themselves

like ingrown hairs festering they’re not the galaxies

they once aspired to with the candlepower

of a single illuminated insight without mirrors

that was enough of a wavelength to surf for light years

and would have carried them all the way there

like Hero to Leander across the Hellespont,

if they’d only been creatively self-destructive

or counter-intuitively absurd enough

to trust the road born with their own feet to walk it

so all your crutches don’t have to do it for you.

How could any of your planets be habitable

if they’re still hanging like a mobile of green apples

on a skeletal bough in autumn long after the leaves have flown?

Cowardice always did have the worst sense of timing

and an alibi like a sin of omission it didn’t commit

against itself like a moralistic etch-a-sketch or the tabla rasa

of a travel journal that never got any further than the page

it wasn’t written on like a tidal pool cluttered with relics

of how dangerous it can be to set sail

on the great night sea of awareness without

even so much as a petal of the moon for a lifeboat.

Falling isn’t for petty people. Go ask the waterbirds

descending into their reflections ascending from the deep,

or light being twisted like a lock of hair

around the finger of any black hole

with the gravitational eyes to point you out

like Icarus re-entering the atmosphere,

a white feather of fear going up in flames,

a meteor with a biological impact on change.

PATRICK WHITE