Offered me your limb...
Should've taken it.
You are missed.

latin poet catullus was often called too personal by contemporaries,
he didn’t write about gods and monsters or heroes or epics,
he wrote about himself and that was terrifying.

catullus wore his heart on his sleeve
and his heart was ugly sometimes, this beating, ****** thing
that would never shut up,
chattering between the line breaks and skirting around the meter.

the opening line to his poem carminae XVI was
“pedicabo ego vos et irrumabo”
which translates pretty literally to
“i will ******* you and face-*******”  
my latin teacher called him “incredibly ******”
i call him “the realest ******* to ever live”  
catullus was the first person to ever write
an open letter to his senatores,
julius caesar burned at the stake of carminae LIV and LVII.
catullus wrote about his boyfriends and his married girlfriend lesbia,
who incidentally was not his beard
or one of sappho’s lovers.
catullus buried his brother in the shrine of carminae CI,
left offerings of wine and bread and coins over his closed eyes.
catullus always made the ugly sound beautiful, eloquent.
you could taste the blood in his mouth,
the pearls and gravel between his teeth.
when i translate his work, he’s the only classic poet
who feels like he’s still alive, laughing at me from his grave
and writing invective epigrams about my grammatical errors.  

catullus was a little bit of an *******, but maybe so i am sometimes,
and catullus was a honest *******.
that’s more than i can say, some days.
he never shied away from himself, not even
from all the ****** parts that are hard to make quiet.
he always wrote about himself because
he understood what ovid and vergil and horace were still learning:
you can’t write about anything if you can’t write about yourself,
if you can’t look at yourself in the mirror
and call your demons by their names.

and now, i too, can jest, waving the brick,
the 20th century's Odyssey,
so too Ulysses, father of, this cantos poet,
it's a well worn book,
to make books like leather, the older
the better, lost the colt stink of freshly
peeled, leather rather than fur,
so too, i, can now close the book and leave
it's ancestry in lost conversation among
the living in cafés and pubs,
so now i can give you a bewilderment i too
am aware of: the chaos of kept Latin
geometrics, style, indeed orthography with
accent here and there, but to dwell on
the past like that, per se, prae se or any such
coercion to disregard the general public,
no surprises with such a pompous raucous,
elephants and stilettos, mass and weight,
bouncing on the moon, the sheer chaos
of how the barbarians lost runes and incorporated
the gaps, i.e.: a, e, o, p, R, b, B, Q, g, d...
                       with Hindu 0, 9, 8, 6, 4...
or as Arabs say: our ten commandments.
but still the chaos, once meaningful now meaningless,
hence programming, encoding, data structuring,
fish tanks think tanks, and SLANG, or SHLANG
as i call it, impromptu youth too cool for school:
still don't know what you're talking about...
the lettering survived because their arithmetic
that gave us beauty like the Coliseum and marble
testicles (later missing with castrato hosanna
in excelsis deo - o took a baritone stance) -
the fall of the Roman empire? all due to
                      I + VI = VII
                      XI + V = XVI.
                                               everyone was like... huh?
can you really **** around with these symbols
in modern physics and mathematics?
... no thanks... we'll keep the alphabet but bring
you down on your mathematics...
but have you seen the Appleton Tower in
Edinburgh? or the library in George Sq.?
you haven't... both are hardly Islamic mosaics and
minarets. as many curves and glitches of beauty
as the models on a catwalk during London's fashion week;
anorexic imagination: keep it square and bony,
me and my godforsaken x-ray vision.
so suma summarum:
it began with: and then went down to the ship...
but ended up with the ship being a gondola
i.e. you in the dinghy (piccioletta) astern there!
i'm not even going to read the drafts & fragments
section (CX - CXVII - C X C V - or the curriculum vitae).