The following was inspired by the 11th Century Latin Poem, “In Taberna” and part of the Carmina Burna.

Painting "Carmina Burana" by Dan Earle

When we are in the tavern, we are unmindful of our graves. Beads of sweat fall sporadically and unnoticed onto the gaming tables as men crowd around like dogs fighting for scraps of food. We are desensitized to the rotting, humid smell of basement mold, spilled ale and body odor. I take a heavy drink from my dark, bitter, unfiltered ale and let it slide down an open throat into an empty stomach; though I can no longer gage my level of intoxication I can suffer the weight of my coin purse slowly trickling away like sand in an hourglass. Some gamble, others drink. Some do both simultaneously to their own detriment. The fortune of gambling shifts like the stages of the moon, ever waxing and waning like clockwork, where some men sit cold and devoid of their own garments others bear the sackcloth and silk of the defeated and gloat in self-satisfaction and over-indulgence. The men in this tavern, regardless of their fortune, no longer fear death; we are the living damned, the excommunicated; sentenced to hell by the same church that brought about the Crusades and the same God who brought us the Black Death. Men throw dice and ask for the blessing of Bacchus, the only pagan god who would frequent these halls, the god of wine and intoxication himself.

Those devoid of all morality, the libertines are the first to drink. We drink to the captives and the living. We drink to the Christians who still have their souls, and we do so without bitterness or hatred; our souls have long since died so we carefully look after the flesh. We drink to the faithful of Elysium and Heaven alike, the women so married to God himself, the soldiers and martyrs, the navigators of the great seas, the unfortunate, the penitent. We drink to the Pope. We drink to the King. We will live by the drink and die by the drink, we will fill our beds with prostitutes and we will curse the world no longer.

There are those who would judge us, further condemn the condemned. But everybody who is living consumes, whether they realize this Truth or not. The mistress drinks, the master drinks, the solider and the clergy drink, the servant drinks—the maid drinks, the apathetic and the ambitious drink, the white man drinks, the black man drinks, the fool drinks, the scholar drinks, the repellant drink, the bishop and the deacon drink, the sister and the brother—the father and the mother, all drink. We all find comfort in the drink—hundreds of thousands who partake of what has been delightfully fermented. The Lord himself turned water into wine to quench the dry and shaken thirst around him.

What started as six-hundred coins is scarcely enough to finance this kind of aimless and intemperate indulgence of the intoxicating. May you hypocrites who would throw the first stone and judge us unfairly never be counted about the blessed; may your names never be carved as Pure and Just. This is a ship without a steersman. We float aimlessly in the paths of the air like a light, hovering bird. No chain could hold me. No key shall imprison me. I search for others like me and join the wretches.