Powerful Invisible Friends

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

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'.

What unites both the bully and the bullied
is how much both states use fear and threat,
where the fear of a threat isolates us 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/my big brother/the police on you'
as if said person would defend them, where mentioning the police
was the weakest threat; the police were viewed as people
who looked after their own before they looked after anyone else.

The invisible friends of the bully were usually stronger
than their opposite number in their silence,
they would encourage him to bully harder
where the invisible witnesses of the bullied
bore witness to 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.