Poem: Inferno

 

Inferno

 

to heal the wound

he had to find a crypt

in a hurt place.

had to dig

through silt and shit

and childish striae,

and not cripple

the ladders in his pain.

 

there would be massacres

in written bones,

and nightmarish mineshafts.

tears would bleed,

make love to lies

worse than the original ache.

 

he would have to swim

like a darter that became

a bat in the pulse of 

an oryx inside a tiger.

no Valkyrie, no Beatrice,

no golden thread.  there

would be cannibals that

bit groins, smallpox boiling

in his daughter’s canthus.

 

there would be red ants

in the coffers of his love,

and other worst fears

he could not survive.

 

he took out a piece of his heart

and dangled it down trapdoors

as demon bait.

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This poem was originally published in Danse Macabre in 2012.   I am going to start re-publishing poems published in the past on this blog.  Why?  A big part of it is the potential end of the US as I knew it, and my concern that I will be incarcerated.  I am, too, in my 60s, and could die of natural causes, exacerbated by grief and anxiety at the loss of the country I knew all my life.

Expect more poems like this, and so a bit of a different poetic voice--who I was ten or more years ago.

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Additionally, on this particular poem, it is in the vein of a shamanic awakening to the spirit world.  But it is also about primal, ethical agony.