Blackest Ever Hole
by Brian O’Blivion
gnOme Books, 2013
78 pages / $7.77 buy from CS or Amazon
Rating: 8.8

In a space of punishing violence, in a realm where black is light, Blackest Ever Hole exists as a crossing of the abyss to temper horror into poetry. This is where “the steepest vertigo pulses,” where volatile suns implode under the weight of shadows. Black is the color of annihilation, and annihilation here breeds horror. These are Plutonian visions that go beneath our planetary crust and deep into the place of the beast. In this vortex of horror lies the human shadow eager for integration, and I’m specifically impressed with O’Blivion’s use of genre as a lens of perception through which his awareness is filtered. This is a journey through the infernal abyss of the blackest black to “a total terror death.”

Speaking of the modulation between form and formlessness, Swami Muktananda wrote about the colored lights that come to those who meditate. He called the black light, Krishneshwari, “the pure unstained state beyond the senses.” Light –– existing as movement, the core distance annihilated the blackened flesh of reality’s bloated and beaten corpse. The abyssal ocean –– its blackened waves moving through telepathic ether to a new field of vision where blood is the determining factor between nothingness and the condensed whirlwind of rancor. These nightmarish fractures propose a cosmic devilry sustained through the vortex of the known –– a distant star field’s darkened embers –– rogue planets collapsing into radiant starlight!

These poems are dark energy vectors pulsating as phantasms through the ultimacy of sorcerous vision! These “transmissions from oblivion” are the rotting fruit of some shadowy realm where the imaginal traverses the actual. We are living in the liminal realms between the actual and the imaginal. This is the crisis of humanity –– the fire vacuum where Bhairava inoculates spatial dissonance with a dark breed of vision. These shards of the eternal, this “anthemic power violence” gestates a wave of blackened bones from the rotting edge of the imaginal. This decayed flesh is warped around puncture wounds that sap the nerve of psychic osmosis. This degenerate volume weeps blood at the smell of lunar shadows poised to deter the exsanguination of sphinxes –– the elliptical orbit of coarse interstellar viscera. This swarm of shadows orbits a spectral influence confining the actual to the furthest chambers of magnetic pulsars equidistant to cellular levels of vampiric tendrils feasting on alien lavender and hound’s blood. Reality is mortally wounded –– punctured by the blackened bones of the imaginal. This is the smell of its flesh.

“We are receiving transmissions from oblivion
The black pools at the bottom of the narrowing
cone
The reality of the video screen has become our
reality
It is a new reality
We are awake and we are hungry
We are eating light
They are swarmed with swollen veins
Aligned on a vector
The veins pulse with a new light
The transmissions enter us
A laser beam burns a hole between our eyes
We have been gifted our memory
We have been gifted a new memory
There is a hole in our forehead
The edge of space has broadened beyond
Time is balanced on a broadened beam
And we move along the green lines of a great
vector
Always skirting the empty black spaces
Always searching out the shortest distance
We drilled a hole through our flesh and our
bone
We bled into our eyes
Our eyes are swimming in pools of blood”