A long way to the highest step.
A long way to the lowest step.
It’s a long climb or a long fall.
The tumble would feel like a polka song
all the way down, and the climb
would become slower and slower
and hurt more and mostly would become
pain, discomfort, a sense of wrong
choice or no choice if you didn’t
want to die. And you don’t
want to die — not yet, not without
digesting all the life you could.
So you sit on the stairway and sigh
that there’s no elevator, no escalator —
not even a moving sidewalk, damn
the creator…you watch for birds,
hoping for a song; you long for coffee,
hoping for a cup; you hope for anything
that would make the decision to sit still
seem more rational. It doesn’t come.
It will never seem rational and it seems
fanciful to the extreme, in fact.
But it’s all you’ve got; dreamer,
fanciful man, irrational man,
elliptical thinker of peripheral thought;
you sit on the midway step, gently blow your
honking nose, weep, and hungrily wait for a sign.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
onward,
T