Spotlighted like some movie star,
how do you stand, being so far?
Lights that glare on polygraph eyes
twitching at truth instead of lies.
Gave your life to forbidden love—
find me some thorns, make me a glove.
Capulet to my Montague? Try:
summer red to my winter blue.

You want *** to be soft, to be sweet,
                    like dripping honey warm
and liquid flowing
         boundless you don’t
               want the mountain ridges
                                   on your lover’s chapped lips,
                                                           ­            you don’t want the
                                                vase to
                                   s      h     a     t    t   e       r
              on the floor as though there is a
                            limit to the sugar, you
                                    want to pour prettiness
                                                  into every crevice of your
                                   heart and you want love
                      to be sweet and soft even
            when your lover is
                                   hard and cold, eyes like
                                  ice and mouth powerful
                                 like mountains and heart
                              weathered like beach pebble—
                                                         ­                     you want a ****** with
                                                          candy lips and long lashes and
                                                      feathery thoughts with long
                                                   sighs of hot breath not
                                                    real words not speaking while
                                                         loving not thinking while kissing
                                                         ­                          not hard and bitter,
                                                         ­           you want soft and sweet,
                                                                ­    you can’t take it like
                                                         bedsheets and bittersweet
                                not soft not hard
not sweet not bitter.

What wicked intent, wretched little Ravidus,
casts you headlong into my iambics?
Which god, ill-invoked by you, readies to stir up a crazed fray?
Or was it so that you can become the subject in popular chatter?
What do you want? Is it pleasing to be famous in whatever way you desire?
You will be, since you determined to covet my loves, along with eternal retributions.

I would like, papyrus, that you tell the young love poet,
my friend, Caecilius, that he should come to Verona,
leaving behind the walls of New Como and the shore of Larius:
for I wish that he receives certain cogitations
of a friend of his and mine.
On which account, if he will be wise, he will devour the road,
although a glittering girl might call him back a thousand times as he is leaving,
and, flinging both arms around his neck,
she might beg that he delay,
who now, if true things are announced to me,
perishes through uncontrollable love of him:
for from which time she reads his incomplete "Mistress of Dindymus,"
from that time, flames consume the innermost marrow of the poor girl.
I forgive you, girl more learned than the Sapphic Muse;
for the "Great Mother" of Caecilius is elegantly incomplete.

You shall dine well, Fabullus, at my house
in a few days, if the gods favour you,
if you will have brought with you a good and large dinner,
not without a shining girl
and wine and wit and all your laughter.
If you will have brought these things, I say, our charming one,
you shall dine well: for the purse of your Catullus is full of cobwebs.
But, in turn, you will receive undiluted loves
of anything which is either more delightful or more elegant:
for I will give to you perfume,
which the Venuses and Cupids gave to my girl,
which, when you will smell it,
you will ask the gods so that they might
make all of you, Fabullus, a nose.

He seems to me to be like a god;
he, if it is lawful to surpass the gods,
who, sitting opposite, gazes at you repeatedly,
and listens to you, laughing sweetly,
which snatches away all senses from miserable me;
for as soon as I beheld you, Lesbia, nothing is left to me of my voice in my throat.

But my tongue is numb,
a subtle flame runs down beneath my limbs,
my ears ring with their own sound,
my eyes are covered with twin night.

Leisure, Catullus, is burdensome to you:
in leisure you exult too much, and you run riot.
Leisure first ruined both rulers and prosperous cities.