Half way on my road through life

I fell from grace and into strife

I left the path, got lost in a dark wood –

Lion roaring, leopard growling,

In the trees a she-wolf howling –

Quite unusual for this neighbourhood.

 

So I agreed to take a ride,

With a Latin poet as my guide,   

Abandoned hope and entered the abyss,

Took the ghost-train into limbo

Where souls in the interim go,

Paid the ferryman and crossed the Styx.

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Sinners suffering from contrapasso,

Poetic punishment that fits the crime,

Nobody forgiven for their trespass, so

They’re stuck in the Inferno for all time.

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The lustful whirling in the pit

Were having a hard time of it,

The gluttonous were screaming fit to burst,

The profligates and misers fought,

Avaricious, tempers short

The wrathful bared their teeth and swore and cursed.

 

Then I descended down to Dis,

Held discourse with the heretics

Who writhed and twisted in their tombs of fire –

The violent and the underhand

Ran round upon the burning sand –

Hypocrites and thieves and falsifiers.

 

Blasphemers and evil sons of bitches,

Torn by hooks and raddled with disease,

Tormented by the demons in the ditches,

Ready with their pitchforks on their knees.

 

Now treachery just isn’t nice

And frozen in a lake of ice

I saw the dregs of all humanity –

Betrayers of family, state and guests,

Buried deep up to their chests –

One gnawed the head of his worst enemy.

 

There at the centre of it all

Stood Lucifer after his fall,

With three mouths, each one biting on a sinner –

Cassius and Brutus too,

Gave him something hard to chew,

And Judas was the main course of his dinner.

 

Climbing down the fur past Satan’s asshole,

Me and Virgil scrambling to get free,

Went up through the chasm to a manhole –

Came out at the gates of Purgatory.

 

Up that mountain, steep and slow,

Then Virgil says ‘it’s time to go’,

He went off to become a Thunderbird,

And Beatrice she took his place,

Sweet companion, fair of face,

I jumped into the limo she chauffeured.

 

Round Paradise we took a spin,

Saw angels dancing on a pin, 

Past martyrs, prophets, patriarchs ascend –

Holy mother, saints alive

As sure as two and two makes five

I saw redemption coming round the bend.