Au lecteur [English translation]

Envy, sin, avarice & error

These are friends we know already —

Feeding them sentiment and regret

I'd hoped they'd vanish.

But wrongs are stubborn

We have our records

and tho it can be struggled with

There's no soft way to a dollar.

On the bedroom's pillows

The leisure senses unravel.

It's too hard to be unwilling

When there's so little to amuse.

The devil twists the strings on which we jerk!

Objects and asses continue to attract us.

Each day it's closer to the end

Without butter on our sufferings' amends.

Like some poor short-dicked scum

Biting and kissing the scarred breast

Of a whore who'd as soon

Drive nails through his nuts

We breath death into our skulls

Afraid to let it go.

If the drugs, sex, perversion and destruction

Haven't made it to your suburb yet

Graffitied your garage doors

Of our common fate, don't worry.

If the short and long con

Both ends against the middle

Trick a fool

Set the dummy up to fight

And the other old dodges

All howling to scream and crawl inside

Haven't arrived broken you down

It's because your boredom has kept them away.

There's no act or cry

That can take this world apart

Snuff out its miserable contemplation

Boredom! Our jailer. Starving or glutted

By the executions? Smoke, desperate for a whiter lie,

You, my easy reader, never satisfied lover.

• Artist:Charles Baudelaire
• Album:Les fleurs du mal