Dew-drinker, opium-eater,
I have seen your mouth transfigured
By the fragments of ancient fevers.
It was a wild, strange sound.
Honey-seeker, sun-worshipper,
I have heard the wind in white cedars
And black poplars.
It was the colour of wet narcissus.
River-walker, crocus-gatherer,
I have tasted the petals of acanthus
And Thessalian iris.
They were but circles of salt.
-Bethany van Rijswijk, from ‘Opium-eater’
"Loneliness ripens the eccentric, the daringly and estrangingly beautiful, the poetic. But loneliness also ripens the perverse, the disproportionate, the absurd, and the illicit."
-Thomas Mann, Death in Venice
"Cut a chrysalis open, and you will find a rotting caterpillar. What you will never find is that mythical creature, half caterpillar, half butterfly, a fit emblem for the human soul, for those whose cast of mind leads them to seek such emblems. No, the process of transformation consists almost entirely of decay."
-Regeneration, Pat Barker
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