After Mimnermus

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τίς δὲ βίος, τί δὲ τερπνὸν ἄτερ χρυσῆς Ἀφροδίτης;

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τεθναίην, ὅτε μοι μηκέτι ταῦτα μέλοι...- Mimnermus, Fr.1

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For all the shit life shovels on your plate

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It has its compensations, too…

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Or so they’ll say.

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Go count your blessings, tally up the joys

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Attendant on each miracle of day,

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And all the other Pollyanna crap

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That hang upon the plural. Life

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Has but a single solitary gift

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Bequeathed to us in recompense—& that

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Is fucking.

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Without it, life is pretty fucking bleak—

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Be scarcely life at all.

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One grayish lump of gristle and the fat

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Coagulating fetid in the broth

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The gullet sticks and nearly makes you choke,

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Before another’s shovelled down your throat.

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And through this grand and monochrome buffet

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There’s one dessert—one solitary sweet— 

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That’s fucking. 

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Mind you, that said—

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It’s pretty fucking sweet.

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It really is just lovely. Sweet

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As wildest honey dripping in the trees

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In eremitic wilderness

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That sound the joyous waggledancing bees;

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And sweet enough to cleanse the prophet’s mouth

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Of locust-flesh; the bitterness and gall

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A lifetime on the palate clinging—all

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In sweetness purged; made light enough to bear—

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Almost.

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Almost enough to bear the aftertaste

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That lingers on the tongue as sweetness flies:

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That strange and bitter foretaste of the last

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And bleakest course life offers on our plate—

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That digestif we never can digest:

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That’s us, of course.

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Trussed up like sucking pigs

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A silent apple stopping up our mouths.

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II.

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The learned men say thinking is the thing.

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Unfettering coarse matter from the mind’s

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Ascension to its heavenly demesne;

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Conspiring with the numinous in airs

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Whose whispers stroke the summer orchard’s leaves

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Content as sleepy kittens on the breeze 

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And ruffling of the zephyrs on the boughs

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Eternally thick-laden with the sun-

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-ripe Apples of Hesperides

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Gold-gurgling in the rivulets of fire

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And honeysuckle streams of heaven’s breast.

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Or nectars breathe; sweet pollens and the scents

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Of deathless blooms, whose petals ever ope

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Stand eye-to-eye to revelate the sun.

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Of course that’s crap. More pabulum and cope

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For mere men to entertain the hope

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That we may strut our mortal frames 

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Of turgid clay; a-shambling through estates

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In shop-worn site-boots, churning up the lawns

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And manicured greens of the divine?

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It’s not our place—how very infra dig

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For pigs like us, to put upon the airs

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And graces of the celestines on high.

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Our lot is windfall. Our place is on the ground,

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Our bristling snouthairs snuffling in the stink

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As applefall’s putrescence sinks

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Its wanton seed to sickly-sour beds;

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Where truffle-hogs go rootling and grunt

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Delighted squeals that muzzle through the muck

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To savour all the feculence and filth

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And moist and cuntripe fragrance of the earth.

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III.

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Man’s life’s a fleeting candlewick: a flame

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And flickering shade at the banquet of the gods,

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No sooner comes, than flitters to the dark.

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And here’s the worst: we imitate their lives

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Eternal in the glory of their lights

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By fucking. Get down dirty with the beasts,

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Grind matter upon matter, flesh on flesh;

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Partake in their eternity of meat,

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Fresh wares for heaven’s abattoir to flog.

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A piglet gorging apples ‘til it’s time

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To slit his throat, and carve him on the plate,

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His rashers dead and nameless as his mate’s.

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Reforge your candle’s tallow-drips anew:

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Your wick is gone. Still sputtered to its end.

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Those darkling seeds you’ve bedded in the dirt,

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Night-nurtured in her subterranean womb,

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Spring forth to radiant ecstasies of light

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But still you’re dust. Dead dust in earthy tomb.

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Your candle snuffed to darkness and to smoke—

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Just vanished like the shadow of a fart.

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Man’s life is like the set-up to a joke. 

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And here’s the punch. The glory and the joy

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Spread supple, panting, there between her thighs:

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Not even that one recompense is free.

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One glorious moment, lightening our load,

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All heaven’s luster mingling with our sighs—

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A lifetime’s horrors heaped upon the kid.

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Whose bloodied head emerges with the cries

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That know full-well your sporting’s just begot

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Another sacrificial goat for them—

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Another butt to carry on the joke.

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A joke that’s fresh and evergreen as them

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Whose sport it is; whose revelry delights

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In heaping scorn and laughter on the heads

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Of frailer lights, that darken all to dust.

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Man’s body, soul, go flying off to smoke—

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Their laughter peals, as deathless as the joke.