Alternative Hell

Dec 17, 2004 22:00

To further the trend started by Cody (meaning, just him and me), here is my alternative version of Hell as calibrated to sins against music.

Canto I

A din wafted up through the first stairs of Hell,

A sound from the darkened stairs, a voice

Announcing my arrival to the land that fell,

Cher’s life after love, Music’s choice.

My head rolled back, a sound came forth

That drowned out even Cher’s sin,

And though my compass pointed due north,

The cloudy air of my mind became thin.

Through all the mist and fog, a face

With eyes in terror and mouth stretched wide

Let forth a scream that filled this space,

Seeming a vaguely musical tide.

I knew him at once to be sincere,

A love of Music, deep inside,

Left out in the cold by a healthy fear

Of talent of any shape or size.

In my heart I felt a pang of sadness

For their souls in essence were basically pure,

Yet to the pure of soul, they still remain less

Because they lack a skill that’s sure.

Doomed forever to scream without Song,

Their punishment less, their fall not so long.

Canto II

Back down the stairs, dank with age,

A rusted door announcing Circle Two,

I entered and saw a man enraged

Who wore a suit purple through and through.

In the corner of the Technicolor room

Sat a phonograph, ancient and solid

That no soul could topple nor tip with a broom,

Broadcasting its sin, clear and lucid,

Like the room. The man danced

Without reprieve, to and fro,

In his dinosaur suit he endlessly pranced,

Seeming joy his belied so.

This master of the children’s show,

Should he cease to move to his sinful tune,

To his legs that dance below

Children’s devilish teeth will attune

Until those legs are naught but stumps;

Then the process repeats as they grow back from bumps.

Canto III

In a daze I returned to those crumbling stairs

And journeyed deeper into the earth;

Soon came four doors, arranged in pairs,

The choice was testing my worth.

I chose the door to the farthest right;

The door opened at the merest thought,

And through the shine of a bright stage light

Came a humming only bees could have wrought.

Shielding my eyes from that blinding spot,

I beheld a woman, her makeup obscene.

Ashlee Simpson, success not hard fought,

Posed by wires, her white face mean.

And lo and behold, she tried to speak,

But her mouth was stitched up tight,

The voice in her throat finding no leak

And humming, trapped in eternal fright.

They all suffer so because they lip-synch,

Never to speak again, I would think.

Canto IV

I retraced my steps to the next door,

My shock slowly turning to grim satisfaction;

From behind the door to Circle Four,

Came the cry of wretching in action.

Once through the portal, my eyes beheld

A sight to shock my soul anew-

Spinning disks like cuts of trees felled,

Men strapped to each center with malevolent glue.

As the turntables spun, one man cried out,

His voice choked off by the lump in his throat,

“If you ever spin any disks, have no doubt,

Sir, your music choice counts note for note!”

At this last phrase his eyes widened in fright,

That lump in his throat became all the more clearly

The waste from his bowels, nausea’s blight,

And he spewed, eyes screwing shut grimly.

All down the line nausea took its toll,

Each DJ vomiting through clenched tooth.

Satisfaction returned me in the doorway’s knoll,

For their choice of music had been so uncouth.

As their spinning continued, I closed the door,

Angry at sin and wanting to see more.

Canto V

Through the third door a humid air blew,

A hellishly comfortable sauna within,

And stretched despondently in this perspiring stew

Were familiar shades of celebrity sin.

On one bench sat Britney, on another, Madonna;

All the divas drained of their cores,

Their hair like string and resting on a

Pair of shoulders like jagged coastal shores.

Clothed in burlap, makeup gone awry,

They retained only shells of their former selves;

Princesses once of a world all a lie,

I felt no pity as they sulked on their shelves.

As they turn from Music, so their true loves turn from them.

Now without song or material world pursued,

Accompanied by the silent anthem

Of those whose lives the material world construes

As truth when truth lies in the Song

They don’t sing but drag along.

Canto VI

Disturbed yet content, I turned away

Toward Circle Six in the middle of Hell

When a sound like woodpeckers gone astray

Accosted my ears. Through the door I fell

And witnessed a thing so strange, so weird,

Whereby crooked old men ran ‘round and ‘round,

Pursued by batons that tore at their beards,

That beat them and forced that pecking sound.

As wood hit bone, the men did strive

To escape, but they could not see,

For thanks to their stubborn wills while alive,

They were beat by their own music legacy.

As under their scorn young musicians did toil,

So their wrath they suffer blow by blow.

As from bitter tongue-lashings their students recoiled,

So their bitter souls run from true lashings below.

For killing their students’ love of a good tune

These teachers will suffer forever, none too soon.

Canto VII

I descended more stairs, crumbling and worn,

When I came across a door so massive,

Concealing the traitors to the art form;

Knowing where I was, I turned to passive.

Why, you ask, was I so calm?

Because to their sins my mind was tied,

These traitors whom Satan palmed

With ease, on whose sins he relied.

Once inside the oaken door,

I beheld a massive, lazy bear,

Consuming all he could and more

While holding Yanni by the hair.

Indifferent to his musical trash,

The beast consumed with one huge paw;

With the other holding Yanni’s hair, he lashed

The wretched man from see to saw.

While Yanni made music so inane,

On earth the market bought and bought

His wretched filth. So now in the same,

This greedy bear destroys what he sought.

As Yanni flopped like a small rag doll,

I turned from the scene and walked a hall.

Canto VIII

The hall became a simple path

Outlined in tape colored red,

And into a room made by Music’s wrath

I dared to lift a foot and tread

Into a room of infinite size,

A labyrinth, twisted, gnarled, and turned,

And out of the dark, a man none too wise

Stepped over the line of red tape and was burned.

While flaming and screaming, the shade gained his wits

Just in time to black out where my feet were to tread.

As he lay there twitching, convulsing in fits,

A vision of record labels danced in his head.

As I looked all around me, my soul became clear,

And I sensed the true scope of this cavernous place.

Everywhere red tape ran but not drawing near

The golden center of this wicked space.

I walked by a group, and these bureaucrats sighed,

“We never draw closer to that stack of gold

That lies at the center. This red tape has lied,

For we’ve passed this spot thrice while our corpses grow old.”

They struggled on, hungry and thirsty, while I

Caught a glimpse of the gold of which they spoke,

A tower far off under brown earthen sky;

To this place’s true nature my soul awoke.

As in life, when red tape left music out to dry,

These bureaucrats burn dry if they cross their own line;

As confusion reigns and no one asks why,

So they walk ‘round forever, paths twisting like vine.

But I, being human, crossed over their tape

Where that tower of gold jutted out like a cape.

Canto IX

As I drew near the gold, a scream caught my ear

That seeped through the ground laying under my feet;

Lying sideways, I quickly corralled my fear

As I found a rectangular hole small and neat

At the foot of the gold. One by one

The bricks dropped on through to Circle Nine,

That deepest of pits sweating under the sun,

To boil away and keep Satan fine.

My body grew heavy as I clambered on down,

A stench like no other invaded my eyes;

What I saw then I can’t say, by Satan’s crown,

Any more than I can describe his lies.

This feared hole under Hell was naught but a vat

Where dropping bricks of gold were melted;

In his alter of moneys, countless shades sat

While their skin by gold liquid was smelted.

I’d never seen such looks on faces

As their souls were boiled in gold;

As the sold out to money in earthly spaces,

So it melts them for infinity, when they never grow old.

Above the scalding bubbles and unearthly screams,

A new sound, pure evil, arose,

The Evil One exacting dues, it seems,

One musical note that all the world knows.

There he comes! Striding ‘cross molten ore,

Saxophone stuck in his vile mouth,

The Destroyer of Worlds has come to the fore

As north collapses into south.

One note he holds, his symbol of fame;

In life, his talent we could not measure.

He turned away from the Way, lacking in shame,

‘Till it was only wealth that he treasured.

I hid my face as Kenny G screamed by,

Holding one note past the end of time.

But his evil engulfed me under earthen sky

As the world of the capitalists claimed part of mine.

At the moment of truth, by Music’s good grace

A quick zephyr swept me from the unspeakable place,

So that the world might know whom Satan befell

And learn from my journey through the gradations of Hell.

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