Literary or not so literary

I’m looking for two stories that I read as a child and can’t locate as an adult. I know at least one of them was made into an “Outer Limits” or a “Twilight Zone.”

I thought the internet knew EVERYTHING. But it doesn’t recognize these.

Department store+y

One is about a man–a writer I think–who is disillusioned and poor (no wonder, if he’s a writer) so he decides to live in a department store. To his surprise, he discovers other people who have made the same choice. Some of them pose as mannequins, or store help, but they punish people by turning them into mannequins. At the end of the story, he’s hiding the manuscript that we have been reading, asking us to look for a mannequin of a certain description–it’s him, he’s going to be punished.

Found by April: Evening Primrose by John Collier

Endless Escalator

Another is about a man trapped on an escalator going down and he can’t seem to get off. He keeps trying, and he somehow can’t for reasons I can’t remember. So, in despair, he decides to ride down all the way down, assuming there will be an “up” escalator eventually. He rides down, down, down, almost succumbing to hunger and thirst and exhaustion. The escalator is endless. But finally he gets to the bottom, and staggers over to the up escalator. There’s a chain across it with a sign: “out of order.” This is the one I think has been turned into a script for an episode of an old TV series.

Found by Amy: Descending by Thomas M. Disch

The Poem of Giants

I’m also looking for a poem that was given to me as a handout in a college class I took. I don’t know if this was the first, second, or third go-round of my college education, which means it might have been in 1979-80, 1981-82, or 1998-2000 (it took me three tries to finally get a degree). The narrator is looking at a suburban street, when something shifts–the angle of the light, or maybe just his perspective. But he suddenly sees monstrous personifications of human emotions, like Joy or Pride or Fear, walking up his suburban street as huge blockheaded walking humanoid creatures. I loved this poem’s disorienting shift, the way it opened up to be strange and epic, and I have NEVER been able to locate it.

Rereading can be a disappointment for me (sometimes a GREAT disappointment), but I still want to read these again. If you know these works, or if you have an idea where I could post to find them, Please Let Me Know!

Thoughts after the rereads: I found both of these stories terrifying as a child. I mean, they both stuck with me. I was surprised by the language of the department store tale, so flowery and poetic and sort of silly. And the story itself is so short! Those translucent people, ancient but nimble, clambering around the balconies–that’s terrifying. Flowery, but frightening. The escalator story is more to my present tastes, as far as style and language. And it’s also terrifying. It’s interesting that both stories are about people without money trying to game the system, paying with their lives.

I wonder if anyone will lead me to the poem about the giant emotions.