Intoxication by Charles Pierre Baudelaire — Read

One must be for ever drunken: that is the sole question of importance. / If you would not feel the horrible burden of Time that bruises your / shoulders and bends you to the earth, you must be drunken without cease. / But how? With wine, with poetry, with virtue, with what you please. But / be drunken. And if sometimes, on the steps of a palace, on the green / grass by a moat, or in the dull loneliness of your chamber, you should / waken up, your intoxication already lessened or gone, ask of the wind, / of the wave, of the star, of the bird, of the timepiece; ask of all that / flees, all that sighs, all that revolves, all that sings, all that / speaks, ask of these the hour; and wind and wave and star and bird and / timepiece will answer you: "It is the hour to be drunken! Lest you be / the martyred slaves of Time, intoxicate yourselves, be drunken without / cease! With wine, with poetry, with virtue, or with what you will. "