Powerful Invisible Friends

The poorest children in the world
don't go to school; amid their poverty
what they learn is how well poverty
make individuals, and individuality, invisible. 

What the educated world's young take home from school
reduces to either how to be a bully without seeming to be,
or how to withstand being bullied in plain sight,
when those who might stop it excuse it
-in the name of 'competition', or social Darwinism.

What unites both the bully and the bullied
is how much both states use fear and threat,
where the fear of a threat isolates the bullied in plain sight. 

I remember well the shouts in primary school,
where the bullied tries to say to his bully
'I will set my dad/big brother/the police on you'
as if said invisible person would defend them,
where mentioning the police was the weakest threat;
the police were viewed as people who would defend
their own before they would looked after anyone else.

The invisible friends of the bully were usually stronger
than the silent friends of the bullied, this imagined strength
became real life strength when the bully bullied harder
whereas the invisible witnesses of the weak bore witness
to the ineffectiveness of the weakness of the weaker boy.

Adult hierarchies were explained as those with the most
had earned it by making the invisible hand of the market
their powerful friend, until they tamely ate from it's hand,
more readily than anyone else was allowed to.

It was hard to argue against imaginary thinking like that.