An Anti-Valentine?

From this morning’s reading of Bill Holm’s Playing the Black Piano, in which he quotes from Walt Whitman’s “Poem on the Proposition of Nakedness”:

Let men and women be mock’d with bodies and mock’d with Souls!
Let the love that waits in them, wait!
let it die, or pass still-born to other spheres!
Let the people sprawl with yearning, aimless hands!
let their tongues be broken!
let their eyes be discouraged!
let none descend into their hearts
with the fresh lusciousness of love!

I suppose that’s enough from the black piano for today.
Why I came to it on the day before Valentine’s, is the question.
-RM