I’m meeting an acquaintance in
the Metaverse at a virtual café
he’s trying to get me to buy.
The possibilities are endless, he says,
and then launches into a spiel about
the money I could make hosting parties
and concerts, inviting musicians,
displaying digital art. I look at myself
in a mirror opposite us in this Victorian
coffee shop with its beige tiled walls,
quaint, brown tables and homely chairs
and my avatar stares back —
wearing a long, leather, red trench coat
with sweeping white hair. He looks like
a vampire right out of a cheesy,
dark romance novel, and I wonder why
I’m here, away from the lightning and
the sharp turns of fortune that infuse
life with vigour and vibrancy,
the reds, blues, greens and yellows
transforming quotidian fever
into something luminous like
the second Eden, the nervous
tension of face-to-face interactions,
the storms of fate that uproot free-will,
pivoting dreams and desires on heels
of uncertainty while the ballroom
catches fire. The server arrives and
hands us the menu. Pretty soon,
we’ll be able to copyright food
and store it in blockchains,
my host continues. I order Mulligatawny
soup and Stewed Eels and wait
for something I have to shovel
into my mouth, but can’t taste
while my host talks about the new
upload feature that removes a person
from his physical body and permanently
places him in the Metaverse. What about
nature, its beauty and cataclysms,
the sense of being part of the whole?
Flashes of light from the chaotic heavens
and water sweeping over macadam,
the grass susurrating underfoot
while the wind soughs in the valley?
I ask my host, and he replies,
The Metaverse is the whole.
It’s the eternal now,
purged of disease and death.
I could give you everything you
asked for and more, even gods
brawling while the thunder echoes.
There is no identity here, the
Post-human is no longer a mortal. We dance
to the rhythm of our minds, being anyone
or anything, anywhere, anytime. The
possibilities are endless.
Photo by Zoltan Tasi on Unsplash
For dVerse
For earthweal
Ordinary Person 
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