Inspiration

You've looked upon my temple walls and seen
    Some joking poems the chaste won't read aloud.
Don't be offended that it's all obscene:
    The verse my prick provokes is not highbrowed.

—20 March 2006

A translation of poem #46 from Priapeia, a collection of Latin epigrams to and about Priapus, a fertility god usually worshipped as an ithyphallic statue. The original:

Tu, quicumque vides circa tectoria nostra
   non nimium casti carmina plena ioci,
versibus obscenis offendi desine: non est
   mentula subducti nostra supercilii.

Needless to say, I have more.

---L.