Tuesday Baudelaire Blogging: The Assassin's Wine

[My adaptation of "Le Vin de L'Assassin." See the original here.]

My wife is dead, I am free!
Now I can drink my troubles hence
When I came home without a pence
Her nagging ripped at every part of me.

Now I'm as happy as a king
The air is pure the sky is bliss
The days were lovely just like this
When I knelt and offered her my ring

This wicked thirst that wracks my thoughts
Could not be sated truth be told
By all the wine her tomb can hold
And my friends you know that that would be a lot:

For I threw her down a well,
And her body I did wedge
With all the rocks around the edge
I still might hope to blot her out in Hell

Thinking of those tender bonds,
Which can never be unsealed,
And hoping to be reconciled
Like we were in drunken days of yon

I implored her in distress
To meet me on a darkened night
She agreed – the crazy wight!
We are all crazy more or less.

She was still my pretty wife
But very tired round the eyes
I loved her too much! that is why
I told her it was time to quit this life!

Above you all I sail like a cloud
How many of you stupid clods
Could ever dream in your wildest thoughts
To make your wine into a shroud?

You scoundrels not worth half a sou
Melodic as a hammer's tune
Not in December or June
Have you ever even known a love that's true

With its fantasies of moans
Its carnival of hellish fears
Its vials of poison, all its tears,
the clattering of manacles and bones

And now at last free and alone!
I will get dead drunk tonight;
And then without a single fright
In the street I will lay down my tired bones

And I'll sleep just like a stray
Though some overburdened cart
So full of stones it falls apart
But not before it rolls my lucky way

To pulverize my guilty skull
Or to cut me down the middle
Of either one I care as little
As I do for Holy Bible, God or Dev-il!