Another book I am still in the process of reading.
Since I usually read 4-5 books simultaneously, progressing at varying speeds, I am still not finished with this one. Moreover, I find each poem so inspiring that the "afterglow" tends to last me for weeks.
Charles Baudelaire wrote one of the masterpieces of French literature, and his "Flowers of evil" are best understood and interpreted if you read them while high and tripping on absinthe. He wrote many of them while high on absinthe himself, so I discovered one day that this is the way how to decode the images he uses in them. A bottle of the mild but enchanting "Absente" (made in France) and a copy of "Les Fleurs du mal" are a perfect match. Be careful, as absinteh can be addictive and moreover give you a terrible hangover if you don't limit yourself to a couple of highly diluted drinks but absinthe is the drink of the poets of the Belle Epoque, and you might start writing some yourself, after while when you start getting inspired. Of course, in those days they did not have that regulation about the 10mg max. of thujone, so I am fairly sure their drink was a lot more powerful than what you can buy in the EU nowadays again. Absinthe did not get outlawed for nothing, though the wine growers may have a lot to do with that legislation, their lobby pressured the politicians who created this ban, which lasted about 80 years.

Anyway, to give you a sample of his poetry:

The Exotic Perfume


When, with both eyes shut, on a close autumn evening,
I breathe the perfume of your heated breast,
I see happy shores unfold themselves
Dazzling in the flames of a monotonous sun;


A lay island where Nature bestows
Peculiar trees and savory fruit;
Men with bodies slim and virile,
Women with eyes of astonishing candor.


Led by your odor to climates of charm,
I see a harbor full of sails and masts
Still tired by the waves of the sea,


Whilst the perfume of green tamarind-trees
Circles the air and fills my nostrils,
Meets in my soul with the song of the seamen.


—translation by Geoffrey Wagner, Selected Poems of Charles Baudelaire (NY: Grove Press, 1974)

You can find the poems online and I think, Baudelaire might deserve a tribe of his own. That would be fun, exchanging these poems with each other. A little more decadent, but potentially more inspiring and fun than the Rumi tribe. Anyone up for it, what do you think?
There is no problem with the copyright either, the whole thing i online already, I assume.