Cum Romae

Reading about Catullus, and I can hardly wait to continue, makes me want to write a poem a bit like his. This is 'as if translated from the Latin', and Cum Romae, I find, is the idiomatic way of saying 'when in Rome' rather than 'quando in Romana', which is what I would have thought.
I had an idea for a second one and vague plans there might be more, a series but not a 'sequence', but when I wanted to write it this morning, the first line had completely gone. One must write these ideas down because they don't always come back.

Cum Romae

One of my girlfriends stops me in the street

and tells me that she has had some good news.

I do my best to listen and enthuse

but it’s another girl I came to meet.

I look over her shoulder at the stream

of passing faces, looking for the one

that has become for me a paragon.

She thinks I am distracted, in a dream,

but love cannot be love if not distressed

by absence or separation or loss

or that it’s not adequately expressed.

To be fair, she is also fabulous

but her news went wholly disregarded.

I should have felt more guilty than I did.