Virtual Reality
or
The Coconut Shy
Aunt Sallies, all of them, sitting there,
in front of the camera, virtual statues,
three whole rows of coconuts gazing
vacantly out of the screen or sitting,
mute like swans, with sound and vision
turned off so nobody will know that
they are there in name only, or perhaps
it’s a pseudonym, a nickname, hiding
the true identity of the sly persona
shying obscurely away from the camera.
Shy, yes, but only at first. The ice breaks.
Conversation flows. A jabberwocky of noise
breaks over headphones, crackles in ears,
meaningless, at times, as the air waves wander,
break up, people switch on or off, or,
having said their say, go mute and fade away.
I think of monkeys, climbing to the top
of the temple steps, sitting there in rows,
plucking at the fur of the friend below them,
then cracking between thumb and index finger
the fleas and other creatures they have found.
And that’s what they will do with the work
that other people present to them – nit pick,
quarrel, pick minor squabbles, disagree with
a noun here, an adjective there, a dangling
participle over there, see, quick, give it
a flick, a twist of the wrist, that’s what
the showman said. There. See? Gone now.
And doesn’t that feel so much better?
Now I sit among them, my own effigy
staring back at me like a death mask in life’s
Madame Tussaud’s virtual wax works,
Jolly Roger, another skull-and-crossbones
faking it for the camera that tells no lies,
even though I despise the shown falsehood –
of ‘stand together or we fall alone’ and yes,
I feel myself falling, toppling off the saw dust
piled into the metal cup, to lie on the ground,
battered and broken, but the show must go on,
though, for me, that’s the final curtain.
rogermoorepoet 