Tunnel To Hell Poem by Chima Ononogbu

There in bed I lied to sail through the night
when suddenly stood I, my spirit, on a spire
over what seemed a vast emptiness with wan face of a desert,
everything including my legs quaked to a near fall
but steadily roved my eyes in a gyre
and shortly downward, in curiosity inwrought with fright,
to a tunnel; a long, narrow tunnel
that stretched down into the earth's bowel
and seemed as though it could run beyond its boundaries
to an interminable space deep into the unknown.

In what was a second, or maybe a minute, or perhaps more,
the tunnel welled up with smokes like unthinking flood;
pitch smoke of a touchable meanness
leaping up noisily like the mutterings of a volcano, and the air
draped in blackness; limitless blackness; coal blackness
twirling in lugubrious circles, over and again.
I stood still, down to my toes frozen, with a fear-struck mind
wondering a lurid kind of smoke with unforgiving spirit this was.

At the time when my optic bulbs seemed flickering out, ebbing,
inconsolably retreating into its orbit,
from the smoke to my ears came a shrill cry of a woman:
"Forgive me Lord, forgive me Lord, forgive me Lord."
So it continued as a singsong of an anguished soul, and although
enclasped by chains of smoke her cries echoed in that valley of darkness
on and on like roaring baritone of a grieving lion.

Now I realized what a pail of endless terror my eyes beheld,
the imagination of her pain entered into my mind,
and my flesh scraped by that flaming whip,
a well of fear emptied into my frail substance,
my dreaded suspicion turned to a rasping reality:
it was a tunnel to eternal hell;
the smoke - the hideously human tormentor in corybantic temper,
a paroxysm of eternal rage,
a barracoon of unholy saints,
a suffering of frenzied sort,
rose up and up in hellish intensity.
I woke up tearing to the scalding of my tender cheeks.