Someone suggested that
it is certain if you fall
into a black hole you will be
crushed well beyond diamond.
Not exactly a fate I’d want,
but that person added
that time elongates as you
go through the event horizon.
If I understood him correctly,
death is instantaneous but
that instant will seem quite long
as you verge on your death.
I could live with that, I suppose
although with my luck I would
irritate my sciatica before entry
and suffer its pain with no Advil.
The universe is populated
by an as yet unknown
number of black holes,
points of hyper-
density whose gravity
is so great that
anything getting
too close can
never escape,
or so we were
originally told.
Hawking suggested
there is hope
for escape, some
energy close
to the event
horizon may
radiate back
into the universe.
In the black
hole that was
my family,
I, luckily, proved
to be that
escaping energy.
He knew, the minute he stepped off, that it wasn’t going to end well. He should have realized it two steps earlier, but hindsight was of little use to him now. He knew he had to keep looking up, to focus on the sky. He knew he had to hope it would be like entering a black hole, where the end is certain but time slows and almost seems to stop. And, he remembered, the laws of physics break down inside the event horizon. What he knew he could not do was look down and see the ground rushing up at him. Even when you are 11, walking off the garage roof was not a really bright thing to do, the dare by your friends notwithstanding.
He imagined the end was coming,
but that was his problem, imagining
for it was about all he was capable of doing.
He started small, near visualization
more than imaginings, but he grew more
proficient with practice, his ideas
his conceptions of an increasingly
grander scale, until from a single thread
he could weave a tapestry that
boggled even his mind, and lent
a reality to his fantasies that he could
never hope to deny, they were palpable.
As his interior world grew larger
infinitely more complex, the exterior
world shrank away until it was little
more than a sensual black hole
swallowing people and places with
an abandon he would have found
fascinating were he not so taken up
with his latest idea, universal in scope
until it subsumed, digested all, including him.
Getting a headache, are we? You feel like Schrodinger’s cat. It’s really like asking yourself if the Big Bang was the beginning of everything, what was there in that split second before the Big Bang? If God created everything, what created God? If time begins with the Big Bang, what time was it before there was time? And who are you really, if you know your are merely an illusion created by you? And please tell me, what time is it? Find the black hole, for there is freedom.
You never read
the ultimate autobiography
which doesn’t exist unless
you live in an Oulipian world.
You can write up to the moment
Of your death, and we would,
if begrudgingly, conceded
the last moments incompleteness,
but you cannot write a true
and complete autobiography
without falling into the recursive abyss
where everything that you say
is suddenly autological
and the reader collapses in
on himself, a literary blackhole.
In the space
of a moment
a universe
can be engulfed,
light pours forth
from a black hole,
suns rise
over the event horizon,
space curves in
on itself
until it is yesterday.
Shrodinger’s cat
feasts on Albert’s twins
and the dice
are just
out of
reach.
an old writer and his words 