The economy of kindness

The world makes sense to psychopaths. 

Its cruel calculus, its torture menu,

provides a complete explanation

to those not expecting hope, 

not seeking compassion, 

those whose economies 

do not accommodate kindness. 

They see the world as it is 

with no ambition about how it should be.

Their unsympathetic, solipsistic reality 

is perfectly insulated from all other possibilities.

These are the monsters we allow to govern us. 

We live in their blind spot. 

We only speak to them in dreams. 

We are ghosts in the corner of their eye

that elude their direct attention, 

anomalies they attempt to eliminate 

with the toss of a coin, because chance 

is the kind of carnage they understand,

so they think. 

In their certainty they exile themselves 

from our commonwealth of ignorance,

in which our salvation is each other,

known risks taken for unknown rewards,

because all likelihood is an illusion,

and no probabilities can be evaluated. 

Chances are not taken, they are given, 

increments of hope offered to others

that do not enter a psychopath's reckoning,  

because we don't have all the facts. 

We will never have all the facts, 

other than what we know we do for others.