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.
[...] Read more
poem by Patrick White
Added by Poetry Lover
Comment! | Vote! | Copy!
