After Mimnermus
︎︎︎ JM Barsley
︎ June 11, 2026
An Exercise in a Cyrenaic Mode
τίς δὲ βίος, τί δὲ τερπνὸν ἄτερ χρυσῆς Ἀφροδίτης;
τεθναίην, ὅτε μοι μηκέτι ταῦτα μέλοι... (Mimnermus, Fr.1)
I.
For all the shit life shovels on your plate
It has its compensations, too...
Or so they'll say.
Go count your blessings, tally up the joys
Attendant on each miracle of day,
And all the other Pollyanna crap
That hang upon the plural. Life
Has but a single solitary gift
Bequeathed to us in recompense: & that
Is fucking.
Without it, life is pretty fucking bleak:
Be scarcely life at all.
One grayish lump of gristle and the fat
Coagulating fetid in the broth
The gullet sticks and nearly makes you choke,
Before another's shovelled down your throat.
And through this grand and monochrome buffet
There's one dessert—one solitary sweet—
That's fucking.
Mind you, that said:
It's pretty fucking sweet.
It really is just lovely. Sweet
As wildest honey dripping in the trees
In eremitic wilderness
That sound the joyous waggledancing bees;
And sweet enough to cleanse the prophet's mouth
Of locust-flesh; the bitterness and gall
A lifetime on the palate clinging: all
In sweetness purged; made light enough to bear:
Almost.
Almost enough to bear the aftertaste
That lingers on the tongue as sweetness flies—
That strange and bitter foretaste of the last
And bleakest course life offers on our plate;
That digestif we never can digest:
That's us, of course.
Trussed up like sucking pigs
A silent apple stopping up our mouths.
II.
The learned men say thinking is the thing.
Unfettering coarse matter from the mind's
Ascension to its heavenly demesne;
Conspiring with the numinous in airs
Whose whispers stroke the summer orchard's leaves
Content as sleepy kittens on the breeze
And ruffling of the zephyrs on the boughs
Eternally thick-laden with the sun-
-ripe Apples of Hesperides
Gold-gurgling in the rivulets of fire
And honeysuckle streams of heaven's breast.
Or nectars breathe; sweet pollens and the scents
Of deathless blooms, whose petals ever ope
Stand eye-to-eye to revelate the sun.
Of course that's crap. More pabulum and cope:
To entertain the hope
That we may strut our mortal frames
Of turgid clay; a-shambling through estates
In shop-worn site-boots, churning up the lawns
And manicured greens of the divine.
It's not our place: how very infra dig
For pigs like us, to put upon the airs
And graces of the celestines on high.
Our lot is windfall. Our place is on the ground,
Our bristling snouthairs snuffling in the stink
As applefall's putrescence sinks
Its wanton seed to sickly-sour beds;
Where truffle-hogs go rootling and grunt
Delighted squeals that muzzle through the muck
To savour all the feculence and filth
And moist and cuntripe fragrance of the earth.
III.
Man's life's a fleeting candlewick: a flame
And flickering shade at the banquet of the gods:
No sooner comes, than flitters to the dark.
And here's the worst: we imitate their lives
Eternal in the glory of their lights
By fucking. Get down dirty with the beasts,
Grind matter upon matter, flesh on flesh;
Partake in their eternity of meat:
Fresh wares for heaven's abattoir to flog.
A piglet gorging apples 'til it's time
To slit his throat, and carve him on the plate,
His rashers dead and nameless as his mate's.
Reforge your candle's tallow-drips anew:
Your wick is gone. Still sputtered to its end.
Those darkling seeds you've bedded in the dirt,
Night-nurtured in her subterranean womb,
Spring forth to radiant ecstasies of light
But still you're dust. Dead dust in earthy tomb.
Your candle snuffed to darkness and to smoke;
Just vanished like the shadow of a fart.
Man's life is like the set-up to a joke.
And here's the punch. The glory and the joy
Spread supple, panting, there between her thighs:
Not even that one recompense is free.
One glorious moment, lightening our load,
All heaven's luster mingling with our sighs—
A lifetime's horrors heaped upon the kid.
Whose bloodied head emerges with the cries
That know full-well your sporting's just begot
Another sacrificial goat;
Another butt to carry on the joke.
A joke that's fresh and evergreen as they
Whose sport it is; whose revelry delights
In heaping scorn and laughter on the heads
Of frailer lights, that darken all to dust.
Man's body, soul, go flying off to smoke;
Their laughter peals, as deathless as the joke.
τίς δὲ βίος, τί δὲ τερπνὸν ἄτερ χρυσῆς Ἀφροδίτης;
τεθναίην, ὅτε μοι μηκέτι ταῦτα μέλοι... (Mimnermus, Fr.1)
I.
For all the shit life shovels on your plate
It has its compensations, too...
Or so they'll say.
Go count your blessings, tally up the joys
Attendant on each miracle of day,
And all the other Pollyanna crap
That hang upon the plural. Life
Has but a single solitary gift
Bequeathed to us in recompense: & that
Is fucking.
Without it, life is pretty fucking bleak:
Be scarcely life at all.
One grayish lump of gristle and the fat
Coagulating fetid in the broth
The gullet sticks and nearly makes you choke,
Before another's shovelled down your throat.
And through this grand and monochrome buffet
There's one dessert—one solitary sweet—
That's fucking.
Mind you, that said:
It's pretty fucking sweet.
It really is just lovely. Sweet
As wildest honey dripping in the trees
In eremitic wilderness
That sound the joyous waggledancing bees;
And sweet enough to cleanse the prophet's mouth
Of locust-flesh; the bitterness and gall
A lifetime on the palate clinging: all
In sweetness purged; made light enough to bear:
Almost.
Almost enough to bear the aftertaste
That lingers on the tongue as sweetness flies—
That strange and bitter foretaste of the last
And bleakest course life offers on our plate;
That digestif we never can digest:
That's us, of course.
Trussed up like sucking pigs
A silent apple stopping up our mouths.
II.
The learned men say thinking is the thing.
Unfettering coarse matter from the mind's
Ascension to its heavenly demesne;
Conspiring with the numinous in airs
Whose whispers stroke the summer orchard's leaves
Content as sleepy kittens on the breeze
And ruffling of the zephyrs on the boughs
Eternally thick-laden with the sun-
-ripe Apples of Hesperides
Gold-gurgling in the rivulets of fire
And honeysuckle streams of heaven's breast.
Or nectars breathe; sweet pollens and the scents
Of deathless blooms, whose petals ever ope
Stand eye-to-eye to revelate the sun.
Of course that's crap. More pabulum and cope:
To entertain the hope
That we may strut our mortal frames
Of turgid clay; a-shambling through estates
In shop-worn site-boots, churning up the lawns
And manicured greens of the divine.
It's not our place: how very infra dig
For pigs like us, to put upon the airs
And graces of the celestines on high.
Our lot is windfall. Our place is on the ground,
Our bristling snouthairs snuffling in the stink
As applefall's putrescence sinks
Its wanton seed to sickly-sour beds;
Where truffle-hogs go rootling and grunt
Delighted squeals that muzzle through the muck
To savour all the feculence and filth
And moist and cuntripe fragrance of the earth.
III.
Man's life's a fleeting candlewick: a flame
And flickering shade at the banquet of the gods:
No sooner comes, than flitters to the dark.
And here's the worst: we imitate their lives
Eternal in the glory of their lights
By fucking. Get down dirty with the beasts,
Grind matter upon matter, flesh on flesh;
Partake in their eternity of meat:
Fresh wares for heaven's abattoir to flog.
A piglet gorging apples 'til it's time
To slit his throat, and carve him on the plate,
His rashers dead and nameless as his mate's.
Reforge your candle's tallow-drips anew:
Your wick is gone. Still sputtered to its end.
Those darkling seeds you've bedded in the dirt,
Night-nurtured in her subterranean womb,
Spring forth to radiant ecstasies of light
But still you're dust. Dead dust in earthy tomb.
Your candle snuffed to darkness and to smoke;
Just vanished like the shadow of a fart.
Man's life is like the set-up to a joke.
And here's the punch. The glory and the joy
Spread supple, panting, there between her thighs:
Not even that one recompense is free.
One glorious moment, lightening our load,
All heaven's luster mingling with our sighs—
A lifetime's horrors heaped upon the kid.
Whose bloodied head emerges with the cries
That know full-well your sporting's just begot
Another sacrificial goat;
Another butt to carry on the joke.
A joke that's fresh and evergreen as they
Whose sport it is; whose revelry delights
In heaping scorn and laughter on the heads
Of frailer lights, that darken all to dust.
Man's body, soul, go flying off to smoke;
Their laughter peals, as deathless as the joke.