C.S. Lewis
          spoke not just for me 
     but for all my best friends

two hemispheres of my mind
          the one side, a many-islanded sea 
     of poetry and myth; on the other 

a glib and shallow rationalism.                                              Lewis, Surprised by Joy 171-72
          This focus on yin and yang 
     logically calls to mind

Milosz’s distinction within 
          his inner doubleness
     between two distinct voices

Naphta his inner dreamer
          and Settembrini his inner humanist                     Scott Milosz, “To Albert Einstein”
     opposed tendencies we all normally have                                            Milosz Witness 69

and of course McGilchrist’s
          588 pages
     on The Divided Brain				                           The Master and His Emissary

that ignored Ivan’s 
          tale of the Grand Inquisitor
     followed by Alyosha’s kiss	                                 Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov

which in turn calls up 
          Pascal’s Wager
     an early example of game theory            Kolokoltsov, Understanding Game Theory, 28

his mathematical advice
          on how to win				                                    Siegfried, Beautiful Math, 197
     If you gain, you gain all 

if you lose, you lose nothing
          Wager, then, without hesitation
     that He is					                                                      Pascal Pensées, III, §233

referring to that presence
          those few who mind most
     feel outside of our selves

on the side of love.
          As we face disruption
     maybe even a nuclear World War Three

the same logic applies
          we can either collapse in despair
     or we can act in the hope

that unprecedented violence and death
          will once again be followed
     by yet another minimal

advancement
towards a better world

The two sons
          of Bernie Madoff the Ponzi master 
     having turned him in to the FBI

died shortly afterward
          one by hanging himself
     the other by galloping cancer

You and I are inclined to feel
          sorry for them in their grief
     but if we think about it

shouldn’t we too be touched 
          more than we dare to dwell on
     by awful twinges of guilt

that our leisure we think of as freedom
          to see and read about this
     depends on the wage-slave labor

in offshore factories like Longhua
          ideal for making iPhones
     long workdays harsh managers

and in just one year
          18 reported suicide attempts 
     and 14 confirmed		

right there in the factory 
          its buildings looped with nets
     to catch falling bodies

with long queues of men
          outside the walls
     hoping to get hired	 			                                         Guardian, 6/18/17 cf. Chan

Slavery has always been
          the price of freedom and refinement
     as in Athens and Rome 

our exemplars in antiquity
          of freedom leisure culture
     and unprecedented hordes of slaves 	

The solstice 
          of classical urban culture 
     was also the zenith of slavery 	                                                                 	Anderson

and also of order as they knew it
          in which injustice went unpunished
     Socrates and Cicero murdered

like the Kennedys and Martin Luther King
          and unlike the big bank tycoons
     in the financial crisis of 2008

which led to the death of smaller banks
          innocent of high crimes
     while ordinary Americans 
    
lost $9.8 trillion in wealth 
          as their home values plummeted 	                                    Washington Post, 9/10/18
     The debts of the big tycoons

were settled by our first black president
          while Bernie in contrast
     was just a one-off

and to universal acclaim
          quickly received a sentence
     of life in prison
   
like the sacrificial goat
          once driven into the wilderness
     to ease the conscience 

of devout ancient Jews

Right now
in this early light
millions of naked people --
many more outside my time zone --
are like me putting on
elaborate disguises
for our unwritten roles
in the vast unfinished drama
Ethogeny                                                                                                        cultural evolution
that at its highest level
is biased towards hope

on the playground of certain death.