Untitled ("I am not alound to walk")

A compressed poem of prohibition and fate, where hell feels less like metaphor than an arrangement deliberately imposed.

A seven-line poem of confinement and damnation: the speaker is 'not alound to walk / to where the end / was ment to be,' and insists 'Hell is not inbetween / like a song' but rather deliberate - 'Now it is on purpose / And he gets it while he is in it.'

The poem turns on a denial of movement toward a destined end, the speaker barred from reaching 'where the end / was ment to be,' fate itself made inaccessible. Its real argument is about the nature of hell: not a transitional, in-between state, not something that drifts by 'like a song,' but a chosen, intentional condition - 'on purpose.' The closing line is the cryptic payoff: 'And he gets it while he is in it,' where 'he' receives his hell from inside it, suffering that is simultaneous with and inseparable from the state itself, no separation between sinner and punishment. The brevity and the flat, almost theological diction give it the weight of a verdict. The spellings 'alound,' 'ment,' and 'inbetween' are the source's own; 'alound' in particular lets the prohibition carry a sonic ghost of 'aloud,' though that resonance is the reader's to hear and not something the source states, so I leave it as the source has it. The piece is short and gnomic, and the antecedent of 'he' is unspecified, so any single fix for who is being damned stays provisional.