YOU TAKE IT IN LIKE A BLACK HOLE

YOU TAKE IT IN LIKE A BLACK HOLE

You take it in like a black hole

and you let it out on the other side,

new, white, and shining just the way

the night transforms the light of the stars

into the insights of a mind so radiantly efflorescent

even the fireflies are blinding.

Why is it the next burning bridge

you’re about to cross is the one

that’s going to give you a chance

to make a new world of it

on the other side, on the other side,

mahaprajnaparamita, gone, gone, gone,

altogether gone beyond to the other side

of this river of life that has none?

Seven come eleven in the casino of your genes

is a lot more exciting than playing the lottery

week after week like a calendar with

an astronomically expanded vocabulary

that remedially assists you in apotheosizing yourself

by cowing your friends and detractors

in the shadows of your imaginary wealth.

Go for broke. Or don’t go at all.

In a desert of windows that have clarified

the universe in a grain of sand, sometimes

even to taste an echo of water on the lips of mirage

is enough to replenish the seas with golden fish.

It’s not wisdom to mythically deflate your delusions

or underestimate your distinctions. I’m grateful

for the mistakes that made me who I am today.

This is the way, that’s the way to the abyss,

the void, the reservoir, the silo, the watershed,

the saline aquifer in the third eye of a dead sea

that knows what it’s like to burn when you cry

as if someone just threw acid in your face

like a spitting cobra with a reptilian grin

on the locket of its skull the moment it opens its mouth.

This is the intimate emptiness when all that’s left

to feel affectionate about, is friendless, boundless space.

Look for a teacher among the pupils

who never attained enlightenment

and apprentice yourself to the liberation

of your ignorance and when your aspirations

of breathing in and out for yourself

have been thoroughly defeated in their turn

like the flashflood of a waterclock that ran out

in a salt flat before it could make its way to the sea,

exalt like a master in the crazy wisdom

of the blazing failure you’ve become in the eyes

of a world it’s impossible to imagine without you.

Sooner die in a bad dream you’re the hero of

or be the princess who rescues a dragon

like a black rhino from the poachers

pimping a bestiary of sexual aids

like the horns of unicorns and black bear livers

to superstitiously impotent totemistic nerds,

than live fictitiously in the shadows of your own shining.

Even if, as I hereby do concede, when you read this,

you’re either too bright to understand me,

or you’re not dark enough to see it immediately

for what it is, a star in daylight, or the lantern

of a new moonrise guiding an eyeless eclipse

through a labyrinth of copulating wavelengths

redshifting like a sunset through a colour wheel,

the precession of the vernal equinox

through an underworld of occult zodiacs

flowering like jewels in the eyes of cosmic root fires.

Trouble begins the moment you stop taking

your life so seriously like the imagination of a child

on the moon grown so intense in the face

of its eventful immensities, she learned

to play with it in defence of its draconian innocence.

PATRICK WHITE