A Way Out

A Way Out

A tyrant teed off at the eighteenth hole;

And as the ball toward the fairway fell,

An aneurysm burst inside his skull,

The tyrant died, and his soul went to hell,

Where it subsisted in a lake of fire,

Dragged down by unendurable torment,

Through depths of despair, progressively dire,

With each passing, agonising, moment,

For infinity; inexhaustibly

Increasing, in mockery of the screams

From the furnace, burning remorselessly;

Fuelled by the seemingly endless streams

Of immortals, damned in isolation;

All tightly crammed beyond suffocation.

In Hell there’s no time; no morning, noon, night;

Infinity is the sum of all fears,

But if one could measure the time in spite:

A span of fifty millennium years

Passed, during which his immortality

Progressed, augmenting pain never ending;

Blinding in its white-hot intensity;

When there came a narrow thread, descending

From above; and he heard the voice of grace

Say: “If you sincerely repent, take hold,

And we will lift you from this cursed place

And gladly welcome you into our fold;

Lovingly rejoice upon your release,

And lead you to joyful, eternal peace”.

“Oh I repent”, he desperately cried,

Grabbing as a drowning man would a straw,

The thread, barely more than a shoelace wide,

That nonetheless raised him up off the floor

Of white heat, toward the heavenly light;

Glowing brighter and brighter the higher

He went, all the while renouncing, greed, spite,

Selfishness, callousness, envy, desire,

And every temptation known to mankind,

Of which he was guilty, in abundance,

And which he presently had left behind;

Traded in exchange for his repentance:

Clinging to the thread of his salvation;

Free of pain, and in anticipation

Of heaven, presently within his grasp.

But something was tugging him from below:

A soul, whose equally desperate clasp

Might break the thread, if he didn’t let go;

And worse: there were many more; a whole chain

Of souls, stretching all the way down toward

The flames. Was his ascension all in vain?

“Get off me” he cried, “Lest you’ll break the chord”;

So saying, he kicked out, with all his might

Till that soul, along with the others fell;

And with but an inch away from the light,

The thread snapped, and he followed them to hell,

As a golf ball long ago descending,

Entered, with thoughts of hellfire, impending.