A Deleted Canto of Dante's Inferno
In the Circle of Work Smokers

The exit ramp from that highway was no neat place.
Bestrewn with wrappers and bags from fast food
joints, McDonald’s, Taco Bell, Wendy’s, the road was hideous.

Once, verdant plants this by-way had fringed,
flowering in brilliant yellows and golds, blazing a trail
for joyful travelers. But no such travelers here trod.

At the bottom of the ramp, Smokey laid his gentle
paw on my wrist; I knew this was a signal and I pulled
to the shoulder. The alarms he raised were subtle.

With two flicks of my finger I raised our windows, so putrid
was the stench that engulfed this valley. A cloud of smog rolled in
from the west; inside it, white collar workers were trapped,

stumbling to keep pace were ashen men in torn
and faded Armani, their jaundiced eyes glued to the ground,
their parchment fingertips stuck to stumps that burned,

cigarettes that couldn’t be flung away no matter how
dexterous was once the smoker. “Who are these,
so haughty and high-born, brought so low

they are unable to raise even their eyes
from the pavement?” Smokey: “They are the businessfolk
who once stood outside the revolving doors of office

buildings, fouling the air. After they would smoke
their cigarettes, they would, as was their practice,
flick the dying embers onto the sidewalk,

where the corpses of filters gathered as dead moths or maggots
who chanced too close to the flame.” With a subtle wave of his paw,
Smokey stopped the next smog-cloud, and the execs

straightened, delighted with the reprieve. “Ask now,
quick, for He who exacts punishment demands
their constant movement. That is his law.”

To one who looked as if he were dying to make amends,
yet used the hiatus to adjust the position of his pinky ring:
“I know why the butt is cupped in your hands,

but why are you so entrapped that you must never stop moving?”
He: “In the world above I was paid to work a nine-hour day –
catered lunch included – but the Surgeon General’s warning

meant nothing to me. Like a child who is told to stay
far from the hot oven, and knowing why, lingers, until mommy turns
her head, waiting to touch the surface and burn his skin away,

from Philip Morris’ own website I could never learn.
Life to me was nothing without my cigarette break,
and the tsk tskers I regarded with the utmost scorn.

Nine or ten times a day I would rise from my desk,
sometimes stop to get a cup of coffee, then wait
for the elevator, ride it down twenty floors, walk

through the lobby lighter in hand, in my lips, a Kent,
waiting for the moment when I could at last savor my smoke.
I would light up, exchange chit-chat with my friends,

then return to my desk by the same path. It took
upwards of 20 minutes. As a result, I would miss
three hours each day, years of wasted work.

My torment now is to scramble breakless through this..”
And then, without warning, a deep, stentorian rumble,
and the middle manager’s words became a hiss.

The cloud lurched – the sudden jerk caused the puffer to stumble
just as the unfamiliar standee is jolted by the start
of the subway car, yet here no straphanger’s shoulder stopped his fall.

With a scraped and bloodied forehead, he was forced to revert
to the oblivion that awaited him in that fetid ether.
I knew then why life for the smoker seemed short.

As there was nothing left to learn, my master,
the nonpareil preventer of forest fires,
made me his passenger, he my driver.

We headed south, through the fog, toward warmer climes.