A short collection of Baudelaire poems from The Flowers of Evil

HEAUTONTIMOROUMENOS
===================
I shall beat you without rage
Or hate, as Moses struck the rock,
As a butcher strikes his block.
I shall make your tears assuage

My drought, my desert in their tide,
You shall weep for my relief,
And on the salt waves of your grief
My longings swollen with hope shall ride,

Like a ship that puts to sea.
My heart, delirious with the sound,
Shall hear your sobs rebound, rebound-
Like a drum that's summoning me.

Am I not a jarring not
In the heavenly symphony
Since devouring Irony
Gnaws me, shakes me by the throat?

Hers is the shrillness in my voice;
Through my blood her poisons race.
I am the unholy mirror
Where the shrew can watch her face.

I am the ulcer and the lance;
I am the bruise; I am the blow;
I am the rack, the limbs also,
Hangman and hanged at once.

I am my own heart's vampire-
One of the vast abandoned host;
Laughter's the doom of those who've lost
The power to smile forever.

(Translated by Naomi Lewis)


DESTRUCTION
===========
At my side the Demon writhes forevor,
Swimming around me like impalable air;
As I breathe, he burns my lungs like fever
And fills me with eternal guilty desire.

Knowing my love of Art, he snares my senses,
Appearing in woman's most seductive forms,
And, under the sneak's plausible pretenses,
Lips grow accustomed to his lwed love-charms.

He leads me thus, far from the sight of God,
Panting and broken with fatigue into
The wilderness of Ennui, deserted and broad,

And into my bewildered eyes he throws
Visions of festering wounds and filthy clothes,
And all Destruction's bloody retinue.



THE METAMORPHOSES OF A VAMPIRE
==============================
Meanwhile the woman, from her strawberry lips,
(Like a snake on redhot coals. writhing her hips
And working her breasts against the stays of her busk)
Let flow these words, with a heavy scent of musk;
"My mouth is wet; and I know deep in my bed
How to bury old conscience till he's dead.
On these proud breasts I wipe all tears away
And old men laugh like children at their play.
For the man who sees me naked, I replace
The moon, the sun, and all the stars of space!
And I am so expert in a volumtuous charms
That when I hush a man in my terrible arms
Yielding my bosom to his biting lust,
(Shy but provocative, frail and yet robust)
The mattress swoons in commotion under me,
And the helpless angels would be damned for me!

When she had sucked the marrow from every bone,
I turned to her as languid as a stone
To give her one last kiss... and saw her thus:
A slimy rotten wineskin, full of pus!
I shut my eyes, transfixed in a chill of fright,
And when I opened them to the living light...
Beside me there, that powerful robot
That fed its fill out of my blood... was not!
Instead, the cold ruins of a skeleton
Shivered, creaking like a weather vane
Or like a sign hung out on an iron arm
Swinking through long winter nights in the storm.

(Translted by Jackson Mathews)
