Intellectual Conversations

We began in autarky,
Two outliers deviating from the crowded mean,
too far flung to enjoy Pareto, fettered
within the boundaries, of our own sub-optimal
Consumption.

The invisible hand gestured,
Beneath the veil of ignorance
Worn diaphanous by desperation, two egos rode the
Utility function. Epicurean delight moralised,
Into a grand equilibrium.

So said Pandora: ‘Ceteris paribus, we are better off.’

The hand made visible feels warm,
Rubbery, like leather from the backs of some endangered species,
An ignoramous? But then, you always were
Unashamedly bipolar, while my likert scale
purports a proclivity to moderate.

I am your muse, you say, as if Paris
Ever bled poetry in his death. Much more a siren,
Greasing your odyssey with ambrosia wails
Till your ears grow lesions, and henceforth no music from my mouth
Harmonises yours.

It is a competition, and we run each other down.

Yet the enemy doesn’t always sits across the table,
Xenophobia is shared, like a couple lunch.
Outsiders taunt laughs, and sub-lunary microcosms clear
The throat, though always with a bitter aftertaste,
Maybe we never really left Nash.

Maybe we are our own Darwin, predicating our own humanity
On some stupid Galapagos birds squawking – why
I am not waiting for Godot. Why we, yak about
Paradise lost with Miltonic heroism, why we persistently ignore
The irony behind a theist and atheist.

Why why? Exactly how we undermine ourselves.

How we talk, and sip on gasified water,
Pauses interspersed by words, or is it the other way?
Semantics stifling silence. I like this democracy,
rhetoric riots better than any Lynch mob, even
in a rambunctious bull run.

Still, we are doubly exposed, through this
small aperture we print as bold italics, underscored
Struck through. Since when,
did we start to auto-focus, zooming in as fast as we zoom out,
Quid Pro Quo?

You tell me transition matters, I can’t figure out the beginning from the end.

A smile lingers in the places our minds wander,
We shriek like children in a game of tag,
I catch you mid-sentence;
You catch me when I fall,
Down the slippery slope of love.