Love Education

Love Education
by Jonathan Balog*

The Greenville County School Board has decided
to remove Sex Education from the curriculum
From now on, kids in grades 5-10 will be given
a tub of Death By Chocolate ice cream,
an empty can for burning old Poloroids,
a vinyl copy of The Cure’s Disintegration,
and will take 8 semesters of Love Education

In Love Education, kids will be taught the difference
between love and emotional dependency
They’ll be taught how to walk without crutches
and how to project their voice without
someone else holding the megaphone

In Love Education, kids will learn the difference
between love and sexual favors
They’ll be taught the ethics of one-night stands
and how to calculate the mathematics and logistics
of hormones divided by guilt and multiplied by loneliness

Instead of preaching abstinence, instructors will teach selectiveness
For the rate at which a virus multiplies in culture is comparable
to the results of dating within your social circle
Instead of preaching protection, instructors will teach caution
For it’s very easy to become incapable of reaching climax
without picturing the scrunched up face of a redhead in the back of a '95 Ford Escort
Throughout the course, kids will learn that
constant behavior breeds constant results,
and the search for an ideal is a circular path
that ends where it began

Throughout the course, kids will learn that
we need to patch our own holes
and happiness with another human being can only follow
the happiness found in solitude

The program was designed by Peter Samsa,
who, upon looking back on his childhood
remembered the loss of his virginity like some movie
whose ending had accidentally been revealed by a stranger
Love, he remembered, had been a lot more complicated

*I remember reading this in the Collegian magazine, as a just-starting-out freshman at Washington College; along about that time I was into the VIta Nuova, The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock, Siddhartha, and all these kinds of things you might read, which might change your life. I found it later online and kept it as a word file. All rights to the author.