Knife's Edge
The first steps up the tower were easy;
blue dreams inside red and yellow gummies;
sweet blueberries and sugar to ease a pain.
Mind-painting secret murals on each rising tread
causing need to climb much higher, faster.
Yellow sunshine gleaming, tempts me
to fantastic leaps; up risers three by three
past giggling Pagliacci clowns;
who seem confused, uncertain, lonely.
Anxiously I slow, I feel I'm going down;
and yet still climbing.
Then unexpectedly, I meet Molly;
the fearfully steep and narrow steps
become an endless whirling spiral staircase.
Laughing, spinning, dancing endlessly,
the stairs rapidly dissolving beneath my feet.
We fall in love, Molly, me, everybody.
But far too quickly, that is not enough.
Up, up, up the black rock candy mountain;
ching-chang, toot-toot
unstoppable,
invincible;
stairs; four stories in a single bound.
"What's that?"
"Who's there?"
It's much harder now to climb;
feet stuck in decayed stairs
of Mexican mud; black tar.
Happiness is not a warm gun;
the stairway no longer leads to heaven.
Now at the top
Teetering precariously
on knife's edge of sanity;
nowhere left to go but down.
Will I take the slow and painful route;
or will it be the fast, more easy one?
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