Saturnalia Satirica
satires wearing different masks
I
Truth
after Catullus
Why are the nicest girls so plain?
Don’t laugh. Now that liberty
has turned to licence in Rome,
I can’t think of a single woman
who’s both virtuous and beautiful.
Worse still, those brutes, the men –
they make me sick. Even senators
with good looks, adorable wives,
farms in Umbria, Caesar’s affection,
play fast and loose with the truth.
Let the love-crazed poets versify
the shapely white necks of swans,
persuading rich widows that theirs,
theirs is the best, the truest of arts
for being so charming, so beautiful.
That’s Plato’s heady twaddle.
Ha! The sow with hairy breasts
butting her piglets in a bog
is prettier by far than the swan
that paddles a politician’s pond.
Pigs! Isn’t the filthiest old boar
tusking up muck in dung-heaps
more honest than a rhetorician?
What truth’s a poet’s glacéd fig
when offal festers in the Forum?
No, the truth is me, Catullus,
me whom moneymen threaten
and adulterers malign and sue.
Stuff them. The fairest of poems
tell the ugliest of truths.
II
Perfect Sex
after Ovid
Don’t shirk the shapeshifter that lurks
inside the human genome’s walls,
that burns inside a lecher’s blood,
a looting soldier’s balls.
If sex and power best evolve
survival for Charles Darwin’s ape,
is perfect sex, for loveless men,
not that vile thing, a rape?
III
On Philo’s Move to Rome
after Martial
Philo’s joined the scuttling, rat-brained rabble
who flee the whole foul African affair,
and then, throughout their emigrant babble,
exploit the colony they couldn’t bear.
IV
Vanity
after Horace
And now, what’s the matter, Demetrius?
Huddled on a bench, picking at a sandal
and gazing gloomily over smoggy Rome,
you look as miserable as one of your friezes –
one of the better ones, to tell the truth.
A cypress, sooty; a Venus, vandalised …
you couldn’t have composed it better.
I’d call it, Ah woe is me, sans nymphs.
Has someone bust their best Greek chisel,
or chipped the tip off Cupid’s perfect nose?
I bet that’s what you’d tell me if I asked,
but no, I won’t, you look too forbidding.
I know, I know, you’re not like that at all.
You’re sensitive, and intelligent, and kind,
and only look depressed and dourly grim
because your patron was seen with a rival.
How you must hate him. The young poseur,
all surface without any gravitas, you said,
dashing off frescoes for the nouveau riche
as if tragedy and the gods had disappeared.
What a life – grovelling for commissions,
riddled with envy, doubt and despair,
and chip, chip, chipping, year after year,
at busts of scroungers and thug politicians.
Quite frankly, I could murder your tutor,
who said you had such hidden potential.
Remember? The disaster began with flattery.
He needed more pupils. Vanity did the rest.
Go and sell onions, start a whore house,
emigrate to the wilds of barbarous Britain –
do anything, Demetrius, except more art!
Why foist your misery on us till you die?
Listen, the toga on your latest Caesar
still looks like a sack. Stop fleeing the truth!
Your appetite for fame will always exceed
the impeccable mediocrity of your gifts.
V
Abstract Art
after Juvenal
I looke...