Among us all - Charles Pierre Baudelaire

It is essential to be drunk all the time.
That’s all: there’s no other problem.
If you do not want to feel the appalling weight of Time
which breaks your shoulders and bends you to the ground,
get drunk, and drunk again.
What with?
Wine, poetry, or being good, please yourself.
But get drunk.
And if now and then,
on the steps of a palace,
on the green grass of a ditch,
in the glum loneliness of your room,
you come to,
your drunken state abated or dissolved,
ask the wind,
ask the wave,
the star,
the bird,
the clock,
ask all that runs away,
all that groans,
all that wheels,
all that sings,
all that speaks,
what time it is;
and the wind, the wave, the star, the bird, the clock, will tell you:
‘It is time to get drunk!’
If you do not want to be the martyred slaves of Time, get drunk, always get drunk!
With wine, with poetry or with being good.
As you please.

---

Charles Pierre Baudelaire (1821 – 1867) France
Translated by Isaac Pereira