Caesar at 50

No longer am I the enfant terrible who tossed knucklebones with my pirate captors until someone threw down a Venus, then wrestled the afternoon, gleaming.

Imagine their looks as I scoffed at the ransom of twenty talents.

“Fifty,” I said, “or nothing. But you'll all hang.”

My friends at Rome squeezed the massy lucre from Asia to pay their fees. Freed, I took ship at Miletus, and dragged the curs back to Pergamum in chains.

Magistrate Juncus dithered, one eye on their loot, so I took five-hundred, myself, from jail, and crucified them to a man.

Racked up other debts in my youth, too– Old King Nicomedes of the lazy eye: sure I let him grunt over me a few times in the dark.

Annexing Gaul was a grimmer slog that paid ten-fold to Rome. In Egypt, when they killed my enemy, Pompey, I wept to see his severed head, agrimace, like a glance at your own face in a bronze mirror, fucking in a strange bed.

Alexandria, the lads erred and put the port to flame, and as the mass of creaking barges flared, I'd just time to leap with the papers I was writing into the sea.

Now I huff, and choke, and swim, one arm holding up these civil documents above a silted, undulating tide while a rag-tag fire darts which pierce indifferent the water each side of me.

Let them say Caesar's debts are unpaid!