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The Birth of Venus, 1923

Even the word is fragmented on my tongue, like the remnants of a shattered vase.

Wine-dark blood pools and bursts forth in springs within my mind, curdling with milk and honey.

My thyrsus charged with electricity, I brandish it like a spear.

DIONYSUS.

I see him in the crackling flame, in the flickering half-light of the altar, in the visions that plague my closed eyelids.

He is watching me. The hands that rests on my shoulder could snap my neck and I’m drowning in the sway he holds over me.

He flips a coin and it lands, face up, in the palm of his hand. A toothy grin etches itself across his face, like a crack in a theatre mask.

He is always smiling. In rage, in ecstasy, in jealously, in love.

Always smiling.

—

Attic skolion (drinking song) quoted in Athenaeus XV.694c-696a.