Poison
By Charles Baudelaire
Wine can invest the most disgusting hole
With wonders to our eyes,
And make the fabled porticoes arise
In its red vapour's gold
That show in sunsets seen through hazy skies.
Opium will expand beyond all measures,
Stretch out the limitless,
Will deepen time, make rapture bottomless,
With dismal pleasures
Surfeit the soul to point of helplessness.
But that is nothing to the poison flow
Out of your eyes, those round
Green lakes in which my soul turns upside-down...
To these my dreams all go
At these most bitter gulfs to drink or drown.
But all that is not worth the prodigy
Of your saliva, girl,
That bites my soul, and dizzies it, and swirls
It down remorselessly,
Rolling it, fainting, to the underworld!