Three Poems by Catullus

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I. fletus passeris Lesbiae
Slalom or luge, venereal cupid, and how
Many men have been to Venus in our dwindling
Years, past the little childgod,
Past the delicacy, when more than eyes
I loved an angry melody or nothing
How the maiden loves her mother. . .
Every gremlin cedes a moving
Bat that cuts around the modal skin.
The Sun dominates and chirps alone!
Nobody iterates empathic shadows,
Neither do they redirect a qualm to me.
Here sits a man at evening’s approach,
Watching orca feast from off the promontory.
He weeps for having abstained from the war.
II. ad Cornelium
To what end the butterfly’s new libels
Aerate my exploded pumice?
Cornet, a tidbit from your bruise:
                  “Nothing is Alone”
To a liquid is the expelled nugget
I am, as we are, one and all italic.
Each tributary fails to pull a card,
But never fails to travel on as futural.
Herr Doktor! I have done work for Jupiter!
Surely I should be exempt from death,
More or less for seven centuries,
                                                     no?
III. de phasello
Now phases pass of more or less
Omphalic hospitality of a greenstalk
To which we are impelled each birth.
Nary a perfector saves his palms
From foraging the wilting lint or winking lilt.
Each negation menaces an elephant,
It negatively insulates the Cyclades,
Noble Rhodes. Thaumatic trace
Repulse the truce that’s pointed east,
Where each post-phase entains a fruit.
Silver coma, name the spiral in juice,
Speak and name the sibyl from your coma.
Friends! Bones have fused to recognize
This primordial phase, ultimate in origin
That even in its dwindling we still walk
And speak the word “uncovered” as if
We still knew what words were worth.
They have no function. They are useless,
Sovereign, and promenade before
Our hungry eyes, we state calumnies,
We put palms into the aquifer,
The east has died of impotent fright!
Each tulip washes the right hand,
And speaks its aura thru a trumpet.
Jupiter decides a simultaneous foot,
Not a literal incident but he gods us
With the fact of a child on the beach.
Nine new pieces make clean milk
Out of each prior fury none remember,
Save the quiet dedication of Castor
And Pollux. . . tis the season!