The Elevator Dreams in Puzzles: A Quirky, Surreal Journey Through Space and Time #SurrealPoetry #AvantGardeWriting

The Elevator Dreams in Puzzles

I pressed the button,
and the elevator sighed,
a long, metallic breath that tasted of floor wax
and forgotten phone numbers.
It whispered something in binary,
but I don’t speak elevator code,
so I nodded like I understood.

When the doors slid shut,
I was no longer in a box of steel and polite yawns—
I was in a dream.
The walls folded inward, then outward,
became origami cranes flying on the wind of a forgotten wish.
The buttons on the panel turned into candy,
sour at first, then sweet, then gone.
The floors above melted into floors below,
a Möbius strip of up becoming down
becoming nowhere at all.

Somewhere between floor 3 and infinity,
a giraffe in a top hat walked in,
tipping its head politely as if this were perfectly normal.
“Going up?” it asked in a voice like velvet
draped over a piano key that refuses to be played.
I told it I wasn’t sure,
because where is up if the universe is a spiral?

We hovered for a moment in a space where time yawned,
stretching its arms like a lazy cat.
The giraffe started juggling the buttons,
ding ding ding—
and each one popped, turning into a balloon
that floated towards the ceiling and beyond,
each one carrying a tiny memory
that might’ve belonged to me or maybe someone else.

By floor 7,
the lights began to speak in riddles.
"What's the sound of a color if no one's looking?"
I tried to answer,
but my voice got caught in the gears,
ground down to static and question marks.

We stopped at floor 11,
but the doors didn’t open to a hallway—
instead, there was a field of purple grass,
where clocks grew on trees and the sky was made of shoes,
all mismatched and dangling like fruit ripe for walking.
A flamingo invited us for tea,
but I had already misplaced my sense of time
and the giraffe said it had an appointment with destiny.

At floor 15,
gravity started acting strange,
rolling its eyes like it had better things to do.
The ceiling became the floor,
and I was walking upside-down on a carpet of stars
while the giraffe tried on a pair of moon boots,
adjusting them with a practiced flick of its hoof.

"Is this where you get off?"
it asked,
but I couldn’t tell if it meant the elevator or the planet.
I shrugged and pushed floor 20,
because that’s what you do
when all the other buttons are candy or balloons.

At floor 20,
we arrived at the edge of a question.
Not a question mark, but an actual question,
dangling in the air like a trapeze artist waiting for the leap.
The giraffe handed me a monocle made of laughter,
and suddenly, the answer seemed obvious—
except it wasn’t, because answers are always trickier
when they hide in plain sight.

The elevator stopped with a jolt,
the doors opened to a room full of jellyfish—
floating, shimmering,
thinking thoughts we’ll never understand.
The giraffe waved goodbye
and stepped out onto a floor that felt like music.

I didn’t follow,
because the elevator had one more secret to tell—
it leaned in close, gears whirring softly,
and whispered:
“You’ve always been here.”

Then the doors closed,
and I was back on the ground floor.
Or maybe it was the top.
Who’s to say?

#SurrealPoetry #AvantGardeWriting #QuirkyPoem #DreamscapeJourney #ExperimentalArt #PhilosophicalVerse #AbsurdistLiterature #CreativeWriting #PoetryCommunity #ImaginativePoetry