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It’s a bar, simply called ‘Abandon All Hope.’  Making my way towards the front and I have a thirst that needs quenching.  All the bottles with shiny liquids swishing in.  there’s not many people in the bar, but two men, dressed in wool cloths sit at the bar.

Going to the bar, the bartender asks, “What’ll be” or something in some tongue I’ve never heard, but understand without hesitation.  

“beer”  I tell him, ‘just a beer.’  Taking a stool, I drink a swig to calm my burning thirst.  Looking at the two men sitting next to me, seeing them real close, one of them looks ugly, the kind that makes you keep staring and the other is quite sympathetic.  Lifting my beer to them as a toast.  One of them spoke up, the sympathetic one.

“what do you think of this place so far, Ivan,” he says with a round cup in his hand and a smirk o his face.

“I think this place sucks,’  I muster.  Looking at the ugly one, the ugly ties to say something, but he starts laughing instead.  A long hard laugh that gets the sympathetic fellow to join him.  They laugh so much, I join in as well, not knowing why.  The ugly one has tears in his eyes as he stops himself from laughing.

“That’s exactly what Dante here said when I frist brought him down here,” the ugly one replied with a smile on his face as well.

I looked at Dante and saw his face, sympathetic with all of us humans.  Looking into his eyes, I saw the stars deep in his eyes, the stars he wrote of.  Looking down at his hands, I stare at his frail hands and wonder how those hands wrote such great poetry.

Looking at the person sitting next to Dante, looking at the ugly one.  I realize who this person is.  It’s the one who wrote the tales of the Aenid.  In Latin he wrote.  The same man who guided Dante down here.  This ugly man laughing with a beer in his hand is Virgil.

All I could do was laugh in unison with the other two.

“Listen, listen, Ivan, I was just discussing with my good friend here what makes a poem nowadays.  In my days, we poets just wrote and our writing had a form, it had rhyme, it had stgructure so much structure, pyramids could be eredcted there.  We rhymed and we were loved for it.  We had poets who sait in dusty rooms while the plague took our families, but us poets still wrote disregarding the miseries for we saw hope in death, hope in life, but we never gave up, that’s the key, isn’t it, not to give up?

“But must we really suffer when writing this poetry?  Must we really live many lives just to write a piece of art?  When I wrote my poem, back in my days, poets were revered…”

“In mine too”

“Yes, in yours too, but back in my time, my dear friends, we had stages to perform our craft.  Stages that held long hours of poetic lines memorized to audiences waiting with silent hearts.   But in my day, poets were a dime a dozen, and in Dante’s, only you educated people survived, am I right, but…”

“Yes, lets get to the point now, since Ivan is here, go ahead, ask him, let’s get a modern”

“Yes, a modern point of view…well we would like to know what you tact on poetry is these days. Since the stage is gone and the epics are no longer being written, what us poets want to kknow, is how you survive as a poet in your day”

On the spot with two great poets, what was there to say but, “by writing, I don’t stop writing, I keep on, looking for what you wrote.  I read what you gentlemen wrote and was inspired by those words.  Thousands of years later, I sit in my room, much like Dante’s and not like Dante’s and with my pen I scratch out my existence and my worries in a world gone topsy-turvy and then I go to a stage much like Virgil’s and not like Virgil’s and I express myself the best way I can.  This poetry that comes fomr you Dante and from Virgil, I still compose in my heart.  And still I read to what crowds come.  In your days you had thousands, but this art is dying and I’m doing what I can to help, let it survive.  Strive on, to endure.”

“I like your answer young man, but let me ask you something else.  Do you believe in muses?  Or where does your inspiration come from?”

I thougt of this and answered my drinking buddies the best way I could.  I picked up my glass and took a drink that satisfied a little bit of my tortured soul for the first time in many years.  Taking a drink and not feeling lonely, having two of my peers waiting for me to give an answer and me eager to talk, spoke up, “Yes, I do believe in muses.”  I said in between two drinks of my disappearing beer.

“Told you he did, now drink up.”

The ugly one took a long drink from his goblet, with driplets falling over the edges of his mouth, onto the rough cloth he was wearing.

“Now what kind of muse, now since you said you believed in muses, I, we want to know if you do have a muse and if you do have one, can you describe it, if you can?

Looking the poets straight on, “I do have a muse and her name is Sara.  She’s this girl I’ve loved since I met her.  I don’t know why, but I’ve been writing for here ears since I’ve met her.  Every poem I’ve written was written for an audience of one and she is the person I’ve been writing these poems for all these long years for.  Every waking moment I have, I think of her, every place I go, I remember her, her face, her smell, her eyes, I know her and she knows me, I love her and she love me.”

“may I intrude real quick.  Then Ivan, if you are writing with a muse, then what are you doing down here?”

“oh I know what kind of love you speak of.  It’s that love that can’t be contained in life, but we try so hard to mimic with words, this love that takes all our lives to live  as, I know what love is and I know your love.”

“Don’t get too sentimental Dante.  We still have somewhere else to go”

“No, Virgil, I was just remembering.”

“Now you did it Ivan, you’ve brought him back inot one of his moods.”

“No its just that we all have our own Beatrice.”

“You just have to say that name, now I’m going to hear Beatrice this and Beatrice that for next hundred years.  Do you know I barely got him to stop talking about his love.  Do you know how long it took me to help Dante forget about her?”

I knew this was a bad idea, but no the great Dante wants to meet his lovesick poet, looking for his love and why because he told me earlier, “I have something to tell him,”  well here we are Dante, what do you have that I so important to tell Orestes, tell him, go on.”

“Ivan, listen to me closely.  Love is fickle emotion.  You can have your life after love, but if love is dead there, who do you keep chasing it.  I followed and searched for Beatric starting in hell, then to purgatory and onward to heaven.  And you know what, when I found Beatrice in heaven, oh yes I was happy, overly excited, but you know where the sadness came in this love, well Beatrice was already dead.  There was no way she was going to come back to earch with me.  These reports of yours, they are saying the same to you.  You can search the underworld for your love, but let me be the bad guy and tell you that your love is dead.  Your love  is not going to return to you.  You might as well give up your search and concentrate on the real problem here.  Ask yourself this, what got you here and how are you going to get back home.  This isn’t life down here.  You can’t solve a problem by finding the mistake, which is your love for Rhonda, but you have to search deep in your mind, in your heart and you must realize why you love the dragon, for its this love of the dragon that’s going to lead you down roads of destruction and many more Rhonda’s along the way.  Once you find the purpose and home of the dragon, it is at that place that you can slay the dragon.  It is does not have anything to do with Rhonda, there is no love between you two, this is all about this love of the dragon.  Once you figure that out, my young poet, then you can make true progress.”  Dante spoke as he picked up his mug and drank down the old suds.

I didn’t want to believe what he had to say.  I had this ugly feeling in my soul.  My teeth were on edge, like millions of drillers wanted to come out onto my tongue.  My mind was flying in all directions thinking of what Dante had just explained to me.  I looked at Virgil and he nodded to me as if I understood what had transpired at this moment.  I looked at the clock and it’s hands were moving backwards.  Looking in my drink and seeing millions of particles floating, lands and other worlds, solar systems in a shot glass, floating in a liquid universe.