The Poems

by Catullus

What man could stomach the sight that was not enthralled by loot, lechery & the political game?

What is he good for – beyond treating the fattest endowment as a comestible?

Is this the reason Rome’s topmost tycoons, father-&-son-in-law, have been playing billiards with our world?

Alfenus from Cremona forsakes the friendship of friends friendless now quick to forget constant only in duplicity. Gods of the Hill-Heavens do not smile on such acts,

Now all is retracted, words, deeds, dissolved under the clouds.

If you’re wise you will swallow the miles though a girl there calls back to you,

Caecilius has indeed sung his incomplete song of Cybele of her strong power over us all with seduction.

if I give myself to her alone, again, discontinue launching these trucacious squibs, on a pyre of coffin chips she’ll burn the verses of the meanest Latin poet read in Rome, a votive blaze to limping cuckolds…

burn script, blaze paper into the fire you rigmarole verse, uncouth, banal Volusian sheets, shit-shotten Chronicle.

I could cheerfully bugger you all while you wait, kicking your heels.

Angst, ennui & angst consume my days & weeks, and you have not written or done anything to soothe my illness.

It could be a sort of ‘tic’. If so, it’s a very vulgar tic, Egnatius, & one to be rid of.

We spare ourselves the nadir of inanity – inane laughter.

To us that blinding mouthful means one thing & one only – the quantity of urine you have swallowed.

Whatever could have possessed you to impale yourself on my iambics? What ill-disposed deity inveigled you Ravidus, into this one-sided contest? Was it a letch for celebrity, at no matter what cost? – then you shall have it: “Ravidus, loving in the place Catullus loves, is lastingly nailed in this lampoon.”

“O tart of turpitude! O brothel lees!”

And the Province calls you beautiful; they set you up beside my Lesbia. O generation witless and uncouth!

Next time I finger that maleficent script let Sestius himself be seized with ’flu & phlegm, who invites Catullus solely to make him read speeches so bad no one else will touch them.

Could Venus yield more love-delight than here she grants in Love’s requite?

Now, the trepidation of departure now lust of travel, feet impatiently urging him to be gone.

– as much the least of poets as he a prince of lawyers.

Godlike the man who sits at her side, who watches and catches that laughter which (softly) tears me to tatters: nothing is left of me, each time I see her,

One opens her bodice, “You could find him between these pink tits if you looked.”

supposing I had the sandals of all the winds I should still find myself sapped dry eaten with fatigue looking for you,

Remember, to keep the tongue locked in the mouth is to reject love’s seasoning:

love-talk enhances love-acts.

Alternatively, if you want to, bolt up your mouth… only divulge to Catullus the whereabouts of thi...

come! bring the bride home set her, passionate, beneath her new yoke lock her up in her love as the tree fast in its ivy.

Happily cleaving the aether the god’s presence descending Hymen will answer your calls:

There are no love-games, fairly played, without you, but with you Venus luxuriates, where is your match among gods?

No fickle lusts, no rooting between other sheets – your husband will lie only in the valley of your breasts,

a ‘hero’ caught in your arms as the grape pole caught in the twisting vine. See! the day fades: shed your concealment!

Ribaldry of marriage and nuts nuts for the scrambling boys, friend! that sort of love is finished,

Does the ‘well dressed groom’ letch after former smooth cheeks? – that sort of love is over,

Within, stretched on the Tyrian couch your one man swelling with love waits for you only,

and he comes, straight to the bedhead, with Venus inside him he takes his desire in full view: love knows no concealments.

Here is no palm for the asking observe these young girls conferring together with girlish seriousness, their care a sole-minded intensity must produce the worth while,

while we distracted deserve our defeat our minds on the one thing with only an ear for the song:

so, intact a girl stays treasured of her sex but let her lose her maidenhead her close petals once polluted she cannot give the same delight again to men no longer be the cynosure of virgins.

Stamp in my footprints! You are tied to my tether.

Capsized in my currents – unsexing yourselves in my Love-hate.

And the touch of Cybebe’s bower brings lassitude. Fatigue lowers their lids.

At once, shedding the night’s tranquillity, Attis relives the pictures in her heart, freed from the maelstrom, unclouded, recognises the rootless place where she has come, her thoughts turned inside out, goes headlong back to the beach, where she cries to Attica she has lost for ever…

A synthetic woman: once man, once lad, once boy. Once the flower of the athletes. Once the pride of the young wrestlers.

the pain at Attis’ heart outweighs the Attis rage.”

the first boat to experience innocent sea –

until waves of her own shake her her hair shakes loose of her yellow snood her thin bodice flaps open at her breasts her breasts, the colour of milk, push through her torn brassière, snood skirt bra the shallows take her torn clothes swirling the silk in eddies at her ankles the clothes do not matter: her body is lost in you Theseus –

“Now no woman listen to man’s love-words “or look to find there his love-bond: “as long as they itch for it “they will say anything do anything, “but with lust slaked “the soft words are forgotten “the promises null.

“Wind is deaf as well as dumb. “And he’s wind-driven in the middle distance.

“all is dumb all is alone all is nothing “but these lids won’t grow grubby with death “till from the gods I’ve wrung amercement – “on Olympus someone tips back the scales.