Modern Inequality

They had grown up. Read English through thick lenses, like the olden day babus who ran their parents' former countries in lieu of the colonists who were too busy being pampered by the natives in the mountain summer capitol. Spoke ad nauseum using the encyclopedic vocabulary of authorities on international debt, election politics, and the decline of feminism. Their skill set fortified by stethescopes or laptops on fire with information. Even in their brown bodies, they no longer represented the malnourished third-world hordes. The newspapers celebrated their type, the avant garde of today's globalized people. A stirred up mixture of this and that. Progress. Starbuck's people.

But in the late night, one of the daughters of this systemic, gluttonous syrup asked the charming, old moon (a woman's companion through the centuries): could she be a lover, and only a lover? Could she throw away all the gold bracelets which she had carefully strung on her thin arms, and follow that one love to his small hut of a house, a far away home at the end of a cul de sac in an obscure suburb, or a dingy apartment secured to allow him the luxurious dignity of being a self-made man on his own two feet? Could that much be enough?

When did the heart become a second-class citizen in this new world?