Hell

The sinners of the last round
lie completely sealed in ice…
--Canto XXXIV, Circle 9: The Inferno

You’ve heard the jokes
about the insurance salesman and some guy
locked in a soundproof eight-by-ten cell,
or the one about being stalled in traffic
with your mother-in-law and her choir of tongues,
the windows cranked up and with no heat.

In grammar school, the old Irish priest
told us the walls were
four thousand miles thick,
that the fire was without seam and everlasting
like a Latin teacher’s conjugation of verbs.

But I always thought it was the way
Hieronymus Bosch saw it with special effects,
vapors and strobe lights, or like being trapped
with an eternity of Munch’s screamers,
their faces dripping that dripless wax.

Today it’s a used car salesman
who won’t give you back your car keys,
or the hail of Have a nice day from the cashier
who is buffing her nails and snapping her gum,
you looking up from the circle of ice,
the defroster in your car still not working.

To read other poems in this blog: “Adverbial Paradoxes” (March 11, 2011); “Keeping a Net Beneath Them” (March 18); “The Need to Tell Somebody” (prose poems – March 30); “Euclid and Barbie” (April 22); “The Devil’s Whore” (June 15); “Dillinger, Alias Jimmy Lawrence” (July 22); “A Want for Reason” (July 27); “Have a Nice Day” (August 7); “Fairy Tales Redux” (August 18); “Double Vision” (September 4); “Teacher, What Did I Miss?” (October 9); “Remember” (October 25); “Dia de los Muertos” (November 1); “Munditia, Patron Saint of Lonely Women” (November 17); “In the Cross Hairs” (November 23); “Hum If You Can’t Sing” (November 29); “Bartleby, the Scrivener” (December 12); “Postscript to an Elegy” (prose poems – December 19); “After His Witnessing an Argument with My Father” (December 26); “Hell” (December 31).