No Action Required

As a gay man I have long known
that some of those I identified with
have talked of, and shared in,
so called 'Sado-masochism'.

And sure, as a gay man who likes
to be well informed I checked it out.

I so enjoyed 'Venus in Furs' that I read it twice
and many times and then I had to give the book a rest
-what I had read left me breathless with expectation.

By the fifth reading I 'got' what the book was about;
undeclared hierarchies which if they were given a name
would be declared not merely null and void, but unhealthy.

The works of the Marquis de Sade bored me much faster.
His writing about rape, sodomy and pillaging other people's lives
only for his fictional victim's morality to live on to be pillaged again.
He showed no awareness of what real human being were actually like.

As I understood more how the silence around violence works
I found I did not need the fear his books set the readers up for,
any more than I, or anyone else, needed his familial insecurities.

I decided that I did not need to be locked up
for half my life the way the Marquis de Sade was by his family,
though my own family did try hard enough.

My reading liberated me from libertinage
along with many other failed hierarchies.

After that no action was required.
I was better off being brave enough
to choose the avoidance of violence.