In a rich land, fertile, replete with snails
I'd like to dig myself a spacious pit
Where I might spread at leisure myoid bones
And sleep unnoticed, like a shark at sea.
I hate both testaments and epitaphs;
Sooner than beg remembrance from the world
I would, alive, invite the hungry crows
To bleed my tainted carcass inch by inch.
O worms! dark playmates minus ear or eye,
Prepare to meet a free and happy corpse;
Droll philosophies, children of rottenness,
Go then along my ruin guiltlessly,
And say if any torture still exists
For this old soulless corpse, dead with the dead!
The Happy Corpse
Charles Baudelaire
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