Hell – This Jolly Beggar

The False Counselor

Word Count: 100
Genre: Fiction

The False Counselor

“What should I do?” she whined.

I met her vacuous eyes, pleased she always gave precedence to my words over others’.

“Forget her! Leave! She’s made her choices, now let her wallow in them!”

“Her children, my grandchildren. They’re still babies . . . .”

“Listen, dear, what’s she ever done to deserve your love?!” I asked, choking back my philosophical angst: can love be love if it’s only deserved?

Maybe she’d have abandoned them without my uttering a word.

But I did.

Now I walk as one divided, my head shorn, then healed, then shorn repeatedly by Hell’s demons.¹

¹The judgment described is taken from Dante’s Divine Comedy, Inferno, Canto 28, in which the poet describes the ninth ring of the Malebolge where makers of discord are condemned.

“So also the tongue is a small member, yet it boasts of great things. How great a forest is set ablaze by such a small fire! And the tongue is a fire, a world of unrighteousness. The tongue is set among our members, staining the whole body, setting on fire the entire course of life, and set on fire by hell. For every kind of beast and bird, of reptile and sea creature, can be tamed and has been tamed by mankind, but no human being can tame the tongue. It is a restless evil, full of deadly poison. With it we bless our Lord and Father, and with it we curse people who are made in the likeness of God.” (James 3:5-9, bold italics mine)

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Dante Bill and Mark Twain Take A Walk

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Note on the players: Dante Bill is an allusion to his namesake from the Inferno; Mark Twain acts as Virgil, his writer-guide through hell. Neither has been consigned there.

Genre: Partial Epic
Word Count: 99

Dante Bill (colorful rapper): Dude, where’s the fire and brimstone? It’s freezing cold here.

Mark Twain (dead white male): Hell’s different from place to place.

What’s with the shrines there?

Shrines? Oh, toilets. That’s for . . . .

Yeah, why the big deal?

They’re the only ones in this area.

That stinks, man! Crowds of woke politicians and their virtue-signaling kool-aid drinkers jumping up and down like yo-yo’s. They could just go in the woods.

Problem is, it’s against the rules. Their punishment is that they have to follow the sign.

Where does it point?

To Satan’s toilet.

In a Dark Hour

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3 A.M.

Awakened to an eerie self-examination of the soul
on the steel-cold surface under surgically precise lights
unentombing cancers, contagion-carrying arteries, dismembered
corruption to the dispassionate gaze of an Enemy brooding,
brooding.

3:20 A.M.

Still sweating under the administered fumes seeping
through pores, guilt-driven language of parents driven
from home to carnage of children preying on children, warfare
of wretched depravity in the eyes of a man, a woman seething,
seething.

3:40 A.M.

Cannot speak, cannot hear, cannot see, cannot feel anything
but the weight of irreversible fate, the darts of the Enemy
injections of delirious oblivion only to awaken to endless night
where no refuge lies from grief and fear and the hate pursuing,
pursuing.

4:00 A.M.

Helpless, my tongue dry, the light dims, darkness closes in,
but a voice is heard, a minister to prophesy over the bitter
collocation of bones, unholy, “O dry bones, hear the word of the LORD!”-
prophesy!- in the body and the blood a Life that is not mine breathes,
breathes.

DailyPostPrompt: eerie

It Can’t Be Smoke: A Haunting

It can’t be smoke that drives you here like a leaf
Caught in a funeral pyre or a sinner fleeing in shame!
What fell blast of Hell’s eternal fire brings you, cruel shade
Upon my porch, and feeds the tendrils of your fiery flame?
Begone, you ghost of the foul-mouthed past that stalks
The children of men, to warn of never-ending death
And griefs that ne’er can mend! Begone upon your walks
Of doom and leave me to life’s revelry and vice
Until its trinkets be a dream and I a shadow like you.

DailyPostPrompt: Smoke

Borrowed Time

I borrow, you borrow, we borrow
She borrows, he borrows, they borrow
The world borrows and borrows to joint sorrow
Hoping there will always be tomorrow.

What, then, do we borrow to our self-destruction
But justice delayed for the satisfaction
Of a life of pursuing our corrupt passion
And ignoring those who need our compassion?

Continue reading “Borrowed Time”