Two lines in, the speaker has already accused everyone present of madness. "We call one another mad," Dave Bonta writes, and the reciprocal phrase "one another" matters. Nobody here is the sane observer. Both sides throw the same insult, and neither is ever proved right.
The title explains the shape of that quarrel. "Scissor, paper" echoes the hand game in which scissors cut paper, paper covers rock and rock breaks scissors. The poem keeps two of the three players and drops the rock. That is my inference, but a telling one: the missing rock is the thing that would end the cycle and give someone the last word. Without it we are left with scissors and paper, a cutting tool and the thing it cuts, trading blows. The title is also singular, one scissor against one paper, while the poem itself widens into "singing scissors" and "a committee of papers." A duel has become a crowd.
The images are small and strange. Scissors that sing sound cheerful, even a little unhinged, and the verb fits the real noise of the blades, a thin metallic shimmer. The simile "like singing scissors" can be read two ways because the poem has no punctuation. We might call each other mad in the way scissors sing, loudly and without embarrassment. Or we might be mad in that way, sharp and tuneless and delighted with ourselves. The line won't choose, and the uncertainty is part of the fun.
The second couplet turns bureaucratic. "Committee" is a word from meeting rooms, and a "committee of papers" suggests memos, forms and minutes holding a meeting without any people. This is where "troubled" becomes interesting. The word hangs loose at the start of the line. It could describe the scissors, or "we," or the whole situation. Whoever it belongs to, the trouble comes from paper in the plural, from officialdom and sheer weight of documents. The singing, cutting voice is outnumbered by a body that cannot sing at all. One reading is that the scissors are the lively, eccentric individuals, the papers the institution that finds them mad. But the poem never confirms this. The papers have their own "mode of mad talk," so the committee is just as mad as the scissors. Each side calls the other mad, and each sounds mad doing it.
The sound of the poem supports that reading. "Mad" appears in the first line and returns in the last, so the poem begins and ends on the same word and goes in a circle, like the game. In between, "committee," "mode" and "mad" carry a soft, humming m-sound, and the s-sounds of "singing," "scissors" and "papers" give the poem a faint hiss, like blades sliding past each other. The poem has no rhyme and no capitals, and its rhythm is uneven. The opening couplet runs seven syllables and then five, light and conversational. The second couplet swells to ten syllables with "troubled by a committee of papers," stuffed with unstressed little words, the way committee language always is. Then it snaps shut on the clipped, nearly all-stressed "mad talk." The line seems to wind up like a long meeting and end on the blunt name for what has been going on.
The absence of a full stop matters too. The poem ends on "talk," and nothing resolves it, so the accusation could simply start again. A game of scissors, paper and rock never ends if the players keep going, and this poem leaves its quarrel open in the same way.
The poem is significant because it packs a whole argument about labels into four short lines. "Mad" is a word we throw at anyone whose way of speaking we don't share, whether that's someone singing, someone drafting official papers, or ourselves. The poem lets the word bounce back and forth until it loses its force. Anyone who has been called unreasonable, or called someone else that, may recognise the stalemate. The poem also treats it lightly, through a child's game and a comic image of scissors in song. It suggests that if everyone is mad, the insult tells us very little, and the more interesting question is how each kind of madness sounds.