Hell is neither here nor there
Hell is not anywhere
Hell is hard to bear.
It is so hard to dream posterity
Or haunt a ruined century
And so much easier to be.
Only the challenge to our will,
Our pride in learning any skill,
Sustains our effort to be ill.
To talk the dictionary through
Without a chance word coming true
Is more than Darwin s apes could do.
Yet pride alone could not insist
Did we not hope, if we persist,
That one day Hell might actually exist.
In time, pretending to be blind
And universally unkind
Might really send us out of our mind.
If we were really wretched and asleep
It would be easy then to weep,
It would be natural to lie,
There’d be no living left to die.