CLIMACOPHOBIA

Photo credit & thanks to:  eberhard grossgasteiger from Pexels

(Climacophobia: a fear of climbing stairs)

Playing statues at the apex of the pinnacle
Of the top of the 'big' slide,
At watering eye-level
With the trunks of poplars.
Except I'm not playing.
Behind me, below me, bump and shove,
Other kids wait-not-waiting their turn,
Impatient to glide back down the shining
Ribbon of glissando,
The squealing slither
Coasting casual on belly or bum.

But there is this trembling 
Stopper in the bottleneck.

I stoop frozen. Jelly leggy. Sweaty.

On some school trip, half way up
Cathedral, windmill, tower, steeple,
Sickening spirals
Jostlers barging,
Climbing contrariwise
Over pocked medieval puddles
In slippery stone.

Or those awful public spaces
Gaping mockery of open plan
Steps with no vertical risers,
Daylight jeering between each tread,
While I steel myself
To bumble down on buttocks,
Blushing cheeks ablaze.

Don't go up one rickety rung
If you daren't come down again.
Life lessons learnt.

Down was always the killer,
The handrail from hell,
The hanging back,
The stepping off
Into cataclysmic abyss,
Vertigo's tunnel
Spinning and pitching.
She who hesitates is lost
In fathomless undercrofts,
Cellars and cryptic crypts.

Bless you, O bless you, terra firma!
I live to kiss the ground.