Frankie, Alfredo

after Catullus

I’ll give you some of your sour grapes to suck on,
since you suspect my poems only sell because
I tart them up like high school girls in Camden.
A real poet must live in stripy jumpers
and two pair of glasses, eschew irony
and mascara and tend countrified passions
lest helpless young men divagate or query
their maudlin eds. and over-the-hill tutors,
whose backs are stiff and abacuses rusty
(hence their tendency to curse their barstools, beat
hendecasyllables with lifeless digits),
why they have to pickle their rhetorical
figures in the formaldehyde of bitters.
And you, full of voluptuous objection,
because my verses spill over with push-up
bras and low-riding tangas think I’m a girl!
Name the dawn. I’ll take your mouths and your money,
both hands tied behind my back, in a blindfold
and ten bona fide inches of stiletto,
one after the other. Or both concurrent.
And no seconds. We’ll just see who’s left standing.