Baudelaire's Liver (translated by Jarvis Belchard)

When the bellowing sky lowers herself, a sick cow 
On my tedious heart (prisoner in a house of dying men)
And gathering her skirts, the circumference of the flat earth,
Evacuates her gloomy bowels on a world of gloomy men;

When earth is a condemned lavatory by a deserted dock, 

In which Hope, like a poisoned bat over a dying fen,
Flies blind and drunk and breaks her stinking black wings
And smashes her rotten head against the damp ceiling;

When the rain hangs like ragged curtains from a nasty sky,
Or like the rusty bars of a plague-infested prison,
And a gibbering army of loathsome, hopeless spiders
Comes to build black webs inside our empty skulls,


All at once the church-bells roar with pain and anger  
And fling long-unpealed curses at deaf heaven,
Like refugees who, starving far from home
Burst into one last despairing chorus of a native ditty.