Nail Biting

Sorrow dawned on me as I looked at the detail,
a party room filled with sequence
and in it, sad looking souls, never quite looking tip-top.

Nervousness has consequences--
their fingertips bled
on big hands, near to their broken mouths, all adolescences

Deadlines engraved in their heads, unreachable goals only lie ahead.
Worry is what they wasted their life on, living it all wrong.
Never once evaluating what exists rather than what's in their head.

Now they waste their time in hell in the waste they did when they felt they were strong,
by biting their nails forever
a disgusting habit they wished they hadn't done for so long.

"Now we wish our habit would have been severed.
For those whose nervousness was pushed to the brink.
Beautiful nails? Never.

Slowly and slowly they shrink,
until there's nothing more to chew.
they're gone even before you can blink",

I heard one mumble about how there was nothing else to do.
But now a punishment to match,
I guess it's where they belong just like a pair, like a baby and its coo.

The destroyed, once lovely, blond adolescence wanting to catch
me up, by saying aloud, "My nails dwindled away and my mouth suffered greatly.
Hell became alive on Earth something wicked like a witch."

Life was no better than hell is now. They spend their time worrying overwhelmingly
now condemned to worry about worrying, starring
at what once was and will never be, sadly.

The young boys and girls, in the figures they were when stress had taken over, sharing
the same nervous thoughts, the same memory, and the same broken jaws and bleeding
fingers, lurking in a wonderful ballroom, pondering

Why they aren't dancing, instead of dancing, why they aren't singing,
instead of just singing, thinking, instead of doing. This is how they lived
and this is why they died. They could have been loving

Instead of questioning their love and who they loved.
They bit their nails; but that's not their only crime. They wasted their lives a long the way
And now worrying is not their only punishment because they lied,

Lied to themselves that nervous habits will make the stress go away
Now broken and ugly they remain
Hurt and scarred by their own hands, and now they're here to stay.


As Dante enters the third and a half level, paralleled to the level that contained the sins of the Wasteful, he sees a ballroom. In the room young boys and girls linger in their loneliness. This is where the nail bitters are left to stay for eternity, in a hell that appears to be quite nice, initially. However, once Dante is able to fully see those who reside here, his heart aches for them. The sinners look young, but destroyed. Their hands large and noticeable, with nails bitten down to the core and blood dripping down from each finger. Their mouths matched the wounds their fingers developed, chipped teeth, blood tinted tongues, and distorted jaws. They are forced to sit in their thoughts, as if sentenced to a hell they created in their own minds. The nail bitters spent their lives worrying, being inactive, and wasting their time and opportunities on petty thoughts. They share a similar memory of being at a dance they were too nervous to participate in. Now they suffer through that painful memory unable to resist biting their nails, forever- past the point of immense pain and anguish.

Kristina Ripp, Period 1