A sense of touch

Rock climbing
Let you and I decode this wall of Braille
Which hides its clues in its rugosity
A ciphered invitation to prevail
Against the sullen pull of gravity.

Probe fingers test the nature of the holds
From edges that release a grateful bite
To hanging shallow spoons on polished folds
Where faith and friction are the keys to height.

Below, those self-same holds now yield to feet,
A changing notion of security,
From hands that pull to legs that, driving, beat
The weighty torso’s dead proclivity.

The rope’s symbolic link from waist to soul,
A nylon thread of voice that simply tells
Of sharing, unity and safe control,
Hangs motionless above the bedlike fells.

Now - on this barer face - the mind reacts
To heightened thoughts of flight and rustling air,
While scanty touch of hand and feet distracts
The will from this, our self-inflicted dare.

But here’s a move that cannot be reversed
The crux that separates two points in time
I take the step that leaves the past dispersed
Embrace the new and justify the climb.

NOTE Amateurish and, even sadder, obvious. But then I was a fearful and incompetent climber too. The aim is to move on to freer, idiomatic, even slangy verse which does not rhyme. The problem then will be to distinguish between my prose and my verse.

QUESTION
(left) What happened next?

SAUSAGE FORK
Downey Engineering of Pontrilas say the prototype of this revolutionary device will cost £20. However, we're shortly off on holiday so the R&D phase is some weeks hence.