[winter]

Hell at the Poetry Workshop

Tonight, no demons stay to stoke
the fires, but lousy poets burn
a lifetime’s jotting at a stake

crafted from worthy and well-worn
tomes of junk. On a topmost skewer,
among fag ends and belching cairns,

Dante smokes, condemned to bear
performances from every workshop
hell has spawned, the worst manure,

the crap - rhythm kings from rap
alley, rookies who’d hook a headline
to a haiku, spewers-up

of bland, spoon-fed Shakespearian
sonnets, bumblers daring to dabble
with terza rima who can’t rhyme

properly, know-alls who babble
and bore, the Lower-Case-Obsessed,
lunging manuscripts from the rubble

of their lives, some sad to cast
those sentimental timepieces
away, others agog at the blast

their verses failed to ignite. Their faces
drift upwards, bereft of mercy,
longing only to change places -

by some feat of necromancy
swap the rhymes they used and abused
on the ring-roads trod by Dante’s

shoes, with his – and so confused
they’d choose a painful death by flames
before the feeding of them. Roused

by the rabble that bedevil his name,
by a flame that licks up his boots
and sucks at the petroleum,

Dante rolls the last cigarettes
in hell and hurls them at the crowd
who’ve already used their last lights,

and eyes the scramble on the ground.