Be Always Drunken

Arima Nayar: What is the Biggest Rock?

Be always drunken.
Nothing else matters:
that is the only question.
If you would not feel
the horrible burden of Time
weighing on your shoulders
and crushing you to the earth,
be drunken continually.

Drunken with what?
With wine, with poetry,
or with virtue, as you will.
But be drunken.

And if sometimes,
on the stairs of a palace,
or on the green side
of a ditch,
or in the dreary solitude
of your own room,
you should awaken

and the drunkenness be half
or wholly slipped
away from you,
ask of the wind,
or of the wave,
or of the star,
or of the bird,
or of the clock,
of whatever flies,
or sighs,
or rocks,
or sings,
or speaks,
ask what hour it is;
and the wind,
wave,
star,
bird,
clock will answer you:
"It is the hour to be drunken!"

--Charles Baudelaire