For the King of Nothing Left

There’s this version of Hell I learned as a kid, 
where the condemned are at this great feast, 
but they’re starving, because all their forks are too long 
to reach their mouths, which means they’d have 
to cooperate, to feed each other, only they’re too selfish. 
It’s Hell One, the Hell of Fools. And we like 
thinking of this Hell, because we know, whoever we are, 
we’re not that selfish. Here, mostly, once someone 
is starving, really getting down into it, and if 
they’d have these super long forks, and the options 
of throwing oneself on the food and pushing people off 
cliffs for the food are off the table, they’d do 
a pretty good job of cooperating. It’s transactional. 
Hell Two starts with the fed who want to remain fed, 
to be the best fed, the promise of always being fed. 
It’s how walls work. Wall around the garden. 
Wall around this blank page, this open field, 
which protects Hell Three, the one of other people, 
and it’s a conceptual thing, a conceptual Hell, the one 
we tell people to go to, blank page adopting the face 
of a transaction, where a vote for and a vote against 
is the same, when neither of them affect you. 
“Yes,” you could say, “exactly,” and then move on 
to whatever you were already doing, chewing tinfoil 
or socks, as examples devil or put feet to Next Hell, 
and in nodding along, the fashionable Hell, Hell Four, 
maybe, or Joke Hell, where it’s not about lapse, or Hell, 
even. “If only there had been signs,” we say, 
surrounded by signs. “Then I’d know what to do.”