Who Wins

How do you find each other exotic?
Can your lives be so inexplicable
To each other insofar as they are

To themselves as yourselves? When were people
Ever terribly different from people?
Ah, culture. Yes, culture. We know, culture.

Do you know culture? Do fish know water?
(This is one of your own cultural jokes.)
In the multi-chambered heart of the game,

There throbs a kind of reversed suspension
Of disbelief, a kind of dropped moment,
When the call hangs in the air and your teams,

However constituted, choose pretend,
Shift from belief to disbelief again
To avoid all believing the same thing,

And in that moment, each of those moments
In the overlapping pulsing of games,
The tangled, cyclic, choreography

Of all your beating games, when you seem strange
To each other, freshly opposing teams
In nearly identical uniforms,

Shirts and shirts, skins and skins, and shirts and skins.
You don’t need a lot of diversity,
Just enough to identify who wins.