Down above

You need weights holding you down
To not sink into the ground and disappear,
And balloons full of joy and laughter
To keep you from drifting on a breeze.
It’s a special kind of hell
To be so free, so unfettered,
That you see the bottom of the earth
When lying in your bed, looking for stars.
You’d think not knowing between
Up and down is terrifying. And it is.
But you learn the rules after a while
And discover you were better off not knowing
That the lowest pit of hell
Is so far above you that
Your neck starts to hurt
If you stare at it for too long.
And the floor isn’t any better,
The gilded staircase of heaven
Hanging just out of reach,
A jump too big to clear the gap.
The place between the corners of the rhombus
Is the most perplexing like that,
Collapsing space in a tight spiral
That brings the extremes together.
I guess you can only start crawling now
Until you get some distance
And can change your perspective again.
You might not get out the right side,
In that happy, peaceful place of rest,
But there’s always the long road around
That gets you there in the end.
Just start from the bottom –
It’s straight down above from here.