Coming Together for Self-Love

Copenhagen.—Hot on the heels of San Francisco and London, Copenhagen is to host a Masturbate-a-Thon in May which organizers hope will help break lingering taboos about self-love, an organizer said Wednesday. AFP, Jan.10/08


We can play it up,
this idea of self-love.

The clerics will not pardon us
nor will the friars. The body
is not a buddy, man.

It needs flagellation
and freedom of movement
of hand punishing and
supplicant in silence:
spikes on ropes
or barbed wires on strings
and the rhythm of points
and bluntness of the spirit
and the receipt of the flesh
of whipping and more whipping
of metal caressing
our tissue of pain
until blood oozes out to declaim,
No more, no more to passion
but back to reason,
cold and calculating
and it is for real, as in graves
and memorial parks
where the deceased
do not weep
nor guffaw nor feel blessed.

So they will show us
the way to this
marathon of self sacrifice,
in full view
of the Copenhagen
sun and stars.

How will the lights
of mornings
ever reflect the motions
in multitudes
of strokes reaching out
to orgasmic delights
while in Kenya, the tribes
are there for the kill,
this spectacle of variety
as we move from
a public place
to private faith in man,
woman, and lover of self?

We need to come out
into the open,
so they say, and admit
that a synchrony
of maneuvers like these
can come out unto its own
and then we say,
Good luck
for good riddance
because man, woman,
and the lover
of self is born.

The impotent seminaries
of the elect would have a lot
to learn from this,
with that show of force
to make us come to grief.

A Solver Agcaoili
Hon, HI
Jan 9/08