If One Were to Hazard a Guess

Twenty-five hundred college students
From twenty-three countries were tested
On a dice-rolling experiment—

In a secure place, no one watching,
Roll a die twice. Record the outcomes.
Whatever you got on the first roll

Nets you a monetary reward.
Higher is better. The second roll
Is to ensure the dice aren’t loaded.

No questions asked. Anyone could cheat.
There could have been twenty-five hundred
Sixes reported. More tellingly,

Cheating could have varied by culture,
Socioeconomic status,
Industrialization levels,

Anything the researchers measured.
But no. The results were consistent
Across the sampled populations.

Statistically, all the reports
Were skewed enough to reflect cheating
But none terribly outrageously.

The pattern showed what the students did
Was not to consistently report
The first roll first, but rather, report

The higher of the two rolls as first,
Which the researchers interpreted
As a preference for white lying

One could rationalize to oneself.
But why rationalize to oneself?
Protecting one’s sense of self as good,

As fundamentally, mostly good
Was one unsatisfying answer.
But why need that? Why need to be good?

Maybe since people are dangerous.
Maybe every self is a sailboat
Against the headwinds of opinion,

Tacking to win its way through the waves.
Submit to the wind and sail backwards.
Sail into the wind and sail backwards.

Advance along a diagonal,
And you just might get across the lake.
Maybe the subjects weren’t preserving

Their nobility in their own eyes
But their sense of their own competence
At reading the hazards in the waves.

Fluency Thinks in That Language

Word by word and phrase by phrase,
The dead rise out of the past
To touch the back of your neck,

Or at least it feels that way.
All reading is translation,
A skill requiring training,

But translation into what?
Your memories of voices,
Gestures, faces, the people

You’ve known outside of writing,
Or outside and inside both.
You’re translating cuneiform,

Hieroglyphics, alphabets,
Any form, into living
Thoughts inside your living flesh,

No wonder you feel haunted.
But you aren’t, really, are you?
No more than when you started

With the memories you had
Of the people that you’ve known.
These aren’t them or anyone

Reaching you out of writing.
Part of you translates, but part
Of you feels these words as words.

Better Check Again

What are the humans doing?
That’s the question humans ask,
Can never risk not asking.

What are the humans doing,
The other humans, strangers
And possible enemies

But also family, friends,
And old, familiar neighbors.
What are all of them doing,

Now, what are they wearing, what
Are they saying, where are they
Hiding or going, what things

Have they added you don’t have,
What things are they discarding,
What acts are they punishing,

What acts are they rewarding—
Humans can’t risk not watching
Humans, what are they doing?

On Board with the Program

There are never enough spacecraft
For everyone. That’s a given
In any scenario, and
There are many scenarios.

But why not? Don’t quote us physics,
Engineering statistics, math.
You’ve asked us to accept spacecraft
Built, filled, and launched from a doomed Earth.

Why go all plausible on us
After asking us to buy that?
The least likely time to pull off
Something so coordinated

Is on the cusp of last collapse.
If you have to insist on that,
Why not tell us how everyone
Gets to climb aboard your space ark?

There, that’s better. All hands on deck.
Thousands of spacecraft carrying
Billions of people and their pets
To meet an interstellar death.

Well, they all had to go sometime,
Unless they all turned immortal,
No matter where the plot put them,
On Earth as it is in Heaven.

Daughter Poem

It does feel less and less
Acceptable to write
About children as they
Grow older and older
And so become their own
Persons with personas.

Personhood has value,
And value’s coveted
And morally structured
By the norms of the times.
Personhood can belong
To churches, enslavers,

Entire communities.
In capitalism
It can be marketed
And, in theory, belongs
As private property
Of the bodily self.

When your child’s a baby,
You’re free to write of her
Charming quirks and foibles,
Her learning behaviors.
By the time she’s a teen,
She owns the copyright

On her tribulations
And shifting perspectives.
If you love her, don’t write
Out her name when you write
About her. She’s building
Her own anecdote hoard.

You, meanwhile, are fading
In value to yourself.
When she writes, if she writes,
You’ll be part of her tale,
Not she yours anymore.
Quietly close the door.

Without Any Reservations

Round up all the poorest folks
And round up all the richest.
The latter will be harder

To find and less numerous,
But for balance pick a count
And then count down from both ends.

In the USA you could
Start with, say, half a million,
Which gets most of the homeless

And all of the billionaires.
Build a camp in the desert,
A giant reservation.

The US military
Has experience, of course,
But you’d need outside forces.

Billionaires are hard to catch
And prone to bribe the hunters
Who are prone to corruption,

Being human and craving
Having greater resources
Of their own for living large.

Give everyone the same hut,
Daily rations, pit toilets,
Drinking water, wash basins,

Good enough for prisoners
Or monks, weather-proof, firm beds,
Clinics for medical care,

And then just leave them all there,
A million people encamped
In orderly rows, paired up,

Rich-poor, rich-poor, basic needs
Met as well for everyone.
Can you guess what happens next?