In the Next Life, Canto I, stanzas 104-109

Your boss was to decide which team got nabbed.
Each unit had a fifty-fifty chance.
But both teams in the dorsal zone got stabbed
before your boss could kick one in the pants.

The fifty-fifty part they could accept
as long as the percentage stayed the same,
but once they thought the deal had not been kept,
they did not feel obliged to play the game.

So, whence the notion that the odds had changed?
Team A believed Team B was like Team A,
Team B believed the same, but rearranged,
and both extrapolated either way.

With perfect trust, the line would stay amid,
but nothing’s like that, and the slightest shift
will feed upon itself the way it did.
A gap in faith will widen to a rift.

The other guys are thinking much like us
while we are thinking, “Why not jump the gun?”
and we think that they’re thinking this way, thus
we do unto before we’re unto done.

Preemptively responding in reverse,
proactively reacting to the threat,
we all trust that the other guys are worse.
If we would do it, they would, you can bet.

©2010 Louis A. Merrimac