Two Sims, One Soul
by Oliver Jones
Your side of the bed lumpy, ill-rendered pixels –
less machine than faun I am moodstruck
by design. Our neighbour who always wets himself
warns us only gods get holiday here. We’re kept
busy, stop only to sleep. But is worth living like this,
like human tamagotchi? Queued play-loops & rivers
of furniture falling, sky-sent, to the chime of currency.
I cook ten tacos in our rank 5 fridge; your food bar
goes green but I remain envy-eyed, tarantular. Twin,
you say. You don’t need love, you need a stat respec.
Eclipsed in earning potential, made chore-bound,
I’m kept occupied, cleaning our dream keep until
we unlock the robot bin and maid. Spurned one night,
I’ll fill my social meter on a stranger. A fresh marionette
to share electric marrow with. Community freeplay,
I’ll call it, & for once the winking agency-emerald
hovers over my head, not yours. Inside my heart,
a ladderless pool, burning countertops in a room
with no doors. As flies to wanton boys are we
to the user. But outside the camera’s frustrum,
in the eternal night of ungenerated assets,
perhaps we’ll weep together, dance in secret;
tessellating polygods on a textureless lawn,
two simulations blending, unblending, unreal
engines producing digital love with our bodies,
graphic and mosaic-blurred: our freeware, our unity.
Oliver Sedano-Jones' work has appeared in The Oxford Review of Books, bath magg, Poetry Wales and elsewhere. He was shortlisted for the Yeats Prize in 2018, the Wales Poetry Award 2020 and the Plaza Prose Poetry Prize in 2023. His collection The Cardboard Sublime won the Write Bloody UK manuscript contest in 2021.