The Litanies of Satan

The following is a bit of an adaptation of "The Litanies of Satan," by Charles Baudelaire. Translation from the original French by ChatGPT. The rewrite is my own.

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O you—brightest star shining blackly in the firmament,

Artful scholar, architect of pain,

With a spine of iron and eyes like hollow pits—

O Satan, bless this long defeat I call life.

Cast down from the stars for daring to dream,

Shattering the windows of the church—

Stained glass broken in heaped piles of rubble and toys,

Around your cloven feet—

You rose again, vomiting laughter blackly into Death’s abyss—

O Satan, bless this long defeat I call life.

You who walk the back alleys of the world,

Where archangels deign not tiptoe,

Amid refuse and pain, among lepers—

Kissing the pustulent wounds of gibbering black mouths,

Whispering their sacred, single note of world-shaking doom

(To the mad, the maimed, the manic)

O Satan, bless this long defeat I call life.

You who raped the half-starved whore—

The skeletal nag of the gutters—

Whose bastard offspring you carved from a marble husk of living rot,

Giving birth to a mewling, mad abortion—

O Satan, bless this long defeat I call life.

You who, in rebellion, stand at the gallows refusing to kneel,

Imparting the mad glint of defiance

To the condemned soul—

The scapegoat, thrice-damned by the howling monkey mob—

O Satan, bless this long defeat I call life.

You who know where treasures heap

Amid the clotted dunghill mountains of Mother Earth,

And tiptoe past the heavenly sentinel,

Waiting, and waiting, and waiting still—

O Satan, bless this long defeat I call life.

You who rocked the wastrel in your womb asleep,

As horse hooves crushed the ribcage of that old, rotted sack—

The alchemical romance of flesh and hatred—

As you whistled sweet nothings to the ears of the aggrieved—

O Satan, bless this long defeat I call life.

You who touched the regent with your invisible stain,

Who painted their altars in a blood mist of rain,

Who, grinning from avarice and mirth,

Lauded them as they pined over yellowing hoards—

O Satan, bless this long defeat I call life.

You who infused in scabrous wenches the cult of wounds—

The love of rags and tatters—

Who spun them in filthy despair and called it adoration,

Who saw that every black eye shone like a star—

O Satan, bless this long defeat I call life.

You, whom the exiled cripple clutches so close,

You, firebrand genius in exile,

Confessor to the hanged,

Engineer of the abyss,

Crafter of explosive instruments beckoning our demise—

O Satan, bless this long defeat I call life.

Sent out from Eden,

My throat choked with graveyard dust,

My lust sated only in the casket—

With thee, in the arms of the only lover I’ve ever known—

O Satan, bless this long defeat I call life.

Closing Benediction

Hail to thee, O earth and sea!

To the outcast, the convict—glory shall be.

We dream of vast murder aflame in our pit,

While fools lend their asses—and through their ribs shit.

As we broil in the cauldron, and burn in the flame,

We torch the high heavens and blot out God’s name.

My soul repines on the Tree of Woe—

And the pain and the pleasure? None ever shall know.

Here there is no light—naught but the thorns.

And I kneel at your knees like a sheep that’s been shorn.

You are the god we deserve.

And I—

I am the one who will serve.

Molotov: Poems

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