My companion thinks she’s too good for me. Do me a favor, huh?

Put her down with some of your poetry. That’ll make her sorry.

                                                                                          — Petronius, Satyricon



Marcus Valerius Martialis,

invective extraordinaire,

your braggart swaggery

virtuoso ratbaggery

precedes you;

it’s savoir unfaire.
Martial, oh Martial,

pillory maestro,

maligning the mammary gland-gifted,

casting aspersions

jocular jibes

rib-tickling burns

knee-slapping kicks in the teeth.
True to your Mars-esque moniker,

you wage war with gut-busting barbs.

Catastrophic catchphrases

bazookas to bazooms

delight

tickle

humiliate

wound.
Was Lesbia’s natis that humungous,

cheeks like Symplegades, really?

Tunic rump-clenched,

sodomizing her culus:

all hail the archaic wedgie!
You’re not pinguiarius, but Flaccus

— poor Flaccus —

doesn’t measure up, either, does she?

Scrawny! Rawboned!

Hips dipped in cheese-grating

steel saw-like spine:

“Girl can’t be mine! Not with those shins,”

or that coccyx like a javelin.
Your cock requires exquisite palpation

no amateur choking your chicken

like virago Phyllis

with snagging acrylics

thumb-strum-throttling your membrum virile.
This inventory of misogyny

phallocratic obloquy

is hardly unabridged,

urtext extending far

longer than Martial’s mentula,

Lydia

Lesbia

Flaccus and Phyllis

paying the vitriol caust.
Fella tore a strip off these ladies,

but who’s the real fellator here?

“My Lord and my God”

— Jesus what a slog —

flattering Domitian in the kitchen

sink filled with vomit as you

compare his locks to laurel tendrils

ad nauseum.
Obsequious adulator

tormenting weasel calumniator

creep nogoodnik louse

swine slimeball SOB

scumbagging fraudator

swindling delator

ratfink pander

cock-sucking fucking ratbag!



In short:
nineteen hundred years dead bully

scurrilous bastard,

scurry, scurry!

I hope you get scurvy!

Well, surely,

blue balls stone ache and corpse.
Forever cease your

epiglottal lip flapping

Martial, oh Martial,

you epigrammatist grump!