#dantes divine comedy

part of a book jacket assignment yeehaw (maybe i’ll post the back and everything later?) 

Dante’s Inferno – THE DELETED CANTO

And then the poet took me by the shoulder, and withdrew a slip of parchment from the wall.

“We are number eighty-and-three, let us go and find a place to seat ourselves,” that great master announced. He guided the both of us to a group of seated sufferers.

Poor, bloated beings, all anchored to blue chairs, their sweat forming paste on their red, sun-scourged skin, adhered to the plastic. Fated to restlessly toil for eternity as lethargic gatekeepers above bellow out number after number, but never the one that might set them free of this agony, here they wait, now hour after hour, now day after day, in a humid swamp of their own collective breathing.

“What is this beige furness of despair that thou hath taken me?,” I asked my Lord, “For after having witnessed the center of the inferno itself, even now, that infernal suffering doth not compare to that which I witness here.” 

“This, my dear companion, is The DMV,” the great master informed me.