FLUX OF THIEVES, CANTO 25
--from The Inferno of Dante Aleghieri

Then he stopped talking, the bandit
Launched two stiff fingers skyward
And screamed, “Fuck you god, sack of shit!”

Thank you snakes for choking that blowhard.
One coiled round his throat, squeezing it
as if to say, “Shut up, retard!”

Snake two bound his arms, handcuffed fist
to fist so tight his hands turned blue
like they’d been severed at the wrist.

Pistoia, queen of some stew
you’ve spawned. Why not spill your own blood
before the whole world stinks like you?

Your son spills the foulest black-biled cud
I smelt in hell’s disgusting pit.
He makes Capaneus look good.

Then he ran off, biting his lip.
Enter a centaur, mad, he rages,
I hear him shout, “where’s the cynic?”

Snake-plagued Maremma’s barren ranges
Hold fewer asps than his horse’s ass.
Till to a man’s back it changes.

Sprawled on his neck and shoulder mass
Lolls a spread-eagled basilik
That scorches all it sees to ash.

My mentor tells me, that’s Cacus.
Beneath Mount Aventine he made his bath
In a lake composed of blood’s detritus.

He’s shoved deeper into this shaft
Than his brothers for his slick theft
Of the great hero he drove-in front to back.

***

Hercules him of his warped life bereft.
He used his club to whack the beast
Until the “senseless skull was cleft.”

Cacus exited. Virgil ceased.
Three souls entered into the pit
below, unknown to us, ill at ease.

They looked up, flinched, shouted, “who’s zat?”
Virgil’s mythology class was over.
We gazed down at hell’s latest drek.

Who were they? They didn’t seem familiar.
But as their colloquy unwound
A name exploded on the ear.

“Where’s Cianfa at? Wa’nt he around?”
Lest my guide interupt, I put
Finger to lip, made as “shh” sound.

Really reader, you really should
have seen it. Unbelievable. Ugh.
I followed it as best I could.

I gawked. A huge lizard-like bug
With six quick reptilian legs, flung
its middle legs around one thug

At gut-level and tightly clung,
tied up his arms with its front
legs, bit down on the screaming tongue

wrapped its hind legs around his butt
and poked its long tail through the fork
of his loins so it stuck way out.

Strangling ivy never did work
So tight as the way this mutant
Entwined those limbs in its monstrous torque.

Neither body now was extant,
A blent half melted half melted wax-like mass,
Shapeless, synthetic, miscreant.

***

Hueless, like paper kindling in a dish
Half-crumpled as flames make it blush
Not yet black, no more white, vaguely brown.

The other two gaped at the hybrid slush
“Wow, Angel, you've changed, son.
You ain’t two or one, fish or flesh.”

Two skulls contorted into one
Both faces were lost but mishmashed bits
Of each one forged one gross compilation.

Two arms congealed out of four flesh strips,
Thigh gobbled calf, belly at torso
unheard-of limbs like hieroglyphs.

What nature made gone all askew
Two things, nothing, twisted image, sick.
Slowly it slithered out of view.

Think of a lizard, watch it flit
By you on a dog day of summer
Into a bush like lightning. Quick

As that small serpent-like creature
Flashed near the stomachs of the two men,
sleek and mean as a bad green chile.

It stung one guy right in the belly-button
Then flopped down onto its own belly
Stretched out there before its victim

Who stared back at it quietly.
Just stood there, opened up his mouth
Yawned like a feverish man deprived of sleep.

Man and reptile checked each other out.
Smoke from the wound, smoke from the beast’s
mouth was billowing, forming one great cloud.

Forget Lucan’s poem where he treats
Of putrid and bloated war carcasses,
This next metamorphosis defeats

***

Ovid and his myth apparatus.
Arethusa as fountain, Cadmus
Into seprent, need not impress us.

Two distinct natures did he show us
Whose individual forms, juxtaposed,
Snapped their essential substances.

So here’s the way they trans-metamorphosed:
The lizard’s thing bisects its tail,
The man blends two legs into a long, thin hose,

Legs and thighs coalesce, joints fail
Of all articulation, bone abates
In one sinewy organic flail.

The fissured tail itself inflates
To form the legs the other shunned.
Its skin grows soft, his like a snake's.

His arms shrunk up inside his trunk
While the Beast's short forefeet expand
As much as the man's arms had shrunk.

Its hind paws entangle in a flange
Of dangling skin like the thing men conceal
His dick splits into little hands.

Smoke bedims each and both, unreal.
Hair emerges on the hide of one,
the other's hair falls out unsheared.

One stands upright, the other flops down.
They never break eye-contact. Next?
Transubstantiation of the snout.

The erect on scrunches muzzle-fresh
temple-ward where folds of fat cheek skin
bunch up into ears. From the excess

Tissue still left where his snout had been,
A human nose blossoms from a reptile skull,
Lips grown thick that had been thin.

***

The other one, prone, jet-propels
His snout. His ears retract back into
His head like horns into a snail shell.

His tongue, discrete organ, soulmate to
His reason, cleaves. The forked beast tongue
Stitches up. Smoke clouds fade from view.

The shamed soul that these staves have sung
Fled hissing from the ditch of grifters.
The other spat, coughed, cursed and swung

Around his new fabricated shoulders
Saying to the third, "I want Buosa
To drag his belly on the boulders

Like I did." This canto's very raw,
Thieves fluctuate in the seventh bogia.
Hard to put in words the bizzare things I saw.

At the time, my eyes were popping out,
My mind was blown, but I scrutinized
The mugs of those low-lifes as they slouched

Out of their cockpit and recognized
Puccio Sciancato, the only pissant
In the first trio not transmogrified.

The other guy was Cavalcanti, called "Squint."