Beauty was many chores. Virtue was unkept promises.

When the devil flirts, seduction is relief.

Entering quiet into your spans of solitude, inferno disguises like lover or friend.

Mistaken glances and double-edged caress. Inferno is dainty, pigtailed, pink-stained.

Inferno is unassuming, inferno is invited in, inferno has already entered.

Inferno is just

Paying attention.

Show us the moment smog cleared and there was everything moving about everywhere.

When passion dragged you, slung you.

When sympathy plagued you.

Inferno raised your head from a false baptism; we are all children of sin. And we are all to be loved.

It is badness,

Apologies, bedroom.

It is beginning, but grows creepy with age.

Inferno is hands dug deep into cake. Inferno is thrill.

You grow up around something and it feels like nothing. Inferno is asking why.

Inferno is inside, and still, outside.

It whispers and flaunts, then steals everything which is yours without notice.

Inferno is quick-fire: Hell so real you convince yourself it’s yours to repent.

Surrender to hell’s becoming, heaven is only if we make it such.

“Io non mori’ e non rimasi vivo; pensa oggimai per te, s’hai fior d’ingegno, qual io divenni, d’uno e d’altro privo” (I did not die, and I was not alive; think for yourself, if you have any wit, what I became, deprived of life and death) [Inf.34.25-27].

Abandon the fear that saves you.

Does damnation birth the free?

Does your skin burn?

And do you know where you are when you’re in it?

Give us everything, everything, everything.

Inferno is descent, then ascent: “E quindi uscimmo a riveder le stelle” (we emerged to see—once more—the stars) [Inf.34.13]