Be Drunk, by Charles Baudelaire

Be Drunk, by Charles Baudelaire

The only way by which we live our lives?
Vocation: state of constant drunkenness.
The only method by which we avoid
the dreadful feeling of the wheel of time
that breaks our back and bends us to the earth.
Maintaining our inebriation how?
Wine, poetry, or virtue as you wish.
We never ceasing in our drunkenness.
And if sometimes, upon the palace step,
the green grass in the ditch on which you lie,
within your dwelling’s mournful solitude,
you wake again, your drunkenness decreased
or disappeared in its entirety.
Go ask the wind, the wave, the star, the bird,
the clock. These things that fly, that groan, that roll,
that sing, that speak. The question you must ask:
“What time is it?” and this is their reply:
“The time right now, when we must all be drunk!
So not to be the martyred slaves of time,
be drunk, a state that is continuous!
Wine, poetry, or virtue as you wish.”