VENEREAL MUSE

O Heart’s Muse, you palace lover—

When January winds hover

Over dark despair of snowy night

Will you have heat to make blue feet white?

Will you bring life to marbled shoulders

With moonlight-pierced shutters?

Knowing money’s spent and throat’s dry

Will you harvest gold from azure sky?

Every eve you got to earn your bread

Like a boy in choir giving head

Blowing smoke to a God nearly dead

Hungry for tricks, you strut like a queen

Till your laugh, soaking in tears unseen

Jogs joy from a vulgar spleen

Baudelaire, “La Muse Vénale” (1857)