Many people seem so immersed in today’s high-tech world that they are oblivious to the real world.

Kids rest comfortably in their basement getting fat on snacks while playing video games that usually involve wreaking major violence on some opponent.

Adults drive around with a phone to their ear, or worse, to their eye, paying partial attention to a road filled with other drivers equally distracted.

People create avatars as an excuse not to deal with the challenge of real relationships, or satisfy themselves with building a list of “friends” on Facebook whom they have never met.

Whether through computers or mobile phones or the world of drugs and self-deception, a significant portion of our population seems to have “checked out”.

It provides a distressing outlook for the future of our society.

Virtual Reality (In the Cat’s Eye, Snap Screen Press, 2009) is a short poem that deals with the future that faces some of those who choose to live in their make-believe worlds.

Glenn K. Currie

 

 

 

Virtual Reality

 

He is a man who chases rabbits,

Dressed in a turtle’s hard-shelled habits.

One of an army of timid souls,

Hiding in plush-lined people holes.

 

Tightrope walking on a druggist’s knife,

His computer makes an avatar wife.

Ones and zeros have set him free,

To drown alone in a digital sea.