Inferno

I think when I post a stanza or two of a WIP, I'm more motivated to get the real thing done.

This poem came about in two parts:

Part one was the day before my birthday. I've been having various issues in nearly every facet of my life (school, family, dA, finances, take your pick), and it was worse somehow because it was so close to my birthday. So I got really depressed. My favorite professor noticed however, and spent most of the afternoon trying to coax me out of it. Then he sent me this wonderful e-mail telling me to smile, which is the subject of the last stanza. I had trouble reconciling the modern sounding "phone" or "e-mail" with the Dante references though.

Part two was two days after all that when I was back in the English department, asking him for some advice on my tutoring internship. He was about to leave anyway, so I walked with him down to the parking lot.

Having spent much of the summer in the department, nearly every time we left he had something to say about the weather. It being so hot, I was already in the mind of Dante and connected it back to the e-mail two days previous, one of Dante's most famous lines being "Abandon hope, all ye who enter here."

And thus concludes my long-winded explanation of how this poem came to be.

_{I'm still in love with that first stanza, the rest isn't nearly as good and I may use it again one day.}

[EDIT] Annnnd, now it's a DLD: [link] With thanks to =DrippingWords

Read aloud here: [link]