Get High by C. Baudelaire

You must always be high. Everything depends on it: it is the only question. So as not to feel the horrible burden of Time wrecking your back and bending you to the ground, you must get high without respite.
But on what? On wine, on poetry, or on virtue, whatever you like. But get high.
And if sometimes you wake up, on palace steps, on the green grass of the ditch, in your room's gloomy solitutde, your intoxication already waning or gone, ask everything that flees, everything that moans, everything that moves, everything that sings, everything that speaks, ask what time it is. And the wind, the waves, the stars, the birds, clocks, will answer, "It is time to get high! So as not to be the martyred slaves of Time, get high; get high constantly! On wine, on poetry, or on virtue as you wish."

Feared Drunk

The following poem won second place in The League for Innovations Literary Contest and appeared in the publication, Confluence.

Suddenly nobody knows where you are,
your body thin as mother’s milk,
your mind tipping like a teacup
on the flesh of a split lip.
Your body is never left alone,
a daughter or your husband sit
like sparrows sipping from an
abandoned spring.

You see things only you alone
can see; Yogi the Bear, The
Virgin Mary and a family
of literate mice.

Lucid dreams leave
your family waiting outside
the picture frame:

You paint Mary leaning
against a pine tree,
Yogi is drinking coffee on
a street corner and
the mouse delivers a note.

Then, from the bed, your gaze turns
from a pearl into a bullet.
You know exactly where you are.

Coming closer, you see the family
resembles a hungry pack
of winter worn wolves.

But there’s no den to retreat into
and no drugs to soften the return.

Once you survive
an addiction,
it becomes the duck
that ate the bread
that does not lead back home,
but rather
to a hot and yawning oven.