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Translation of Charles Baudelaire’s The Gladly Dead by

The Abbess of Abjection

In the rich inhuman earth, I wish to dig

Myself a grave, deeper than the darkest

Act of time

And stretch myself out on a rack of ease

To sleep obliteration

Like a shark in a storm

Hating testaments and Christ’s cracked stones

Before I’d ask you to mourn

I’d go alive and call the crows

To gut the last scrap of my carrion

You worms! Black amities without eye

Or ear, a dead man

Enters your dirt with a celebrant’s heart,

Feasting philosophers, beasts

Born of decay

Come, plunder my ruins

Without a shudder in your blood

As no torture is left to dread

For this old, soulless flesh

Dead as the dead.