Three lives

This is the future.
This is our parallel lives,
our alternative biographies,
disaggregated but simultaneous,
sitting side by side:

curating tamagochi-style,
consequence-free
social media marriages
between fantasy avatars,
letting anonymity disinhibit
all the angels and monsters,
within us, watching them
mutate into each other,
and into something else
entirely new;

losing the culture flame-wars
against the radical apathists
on multiple platforms,
insisting on existing to nihilists
and teenage epistemological relativists
who condescend to professors
because they have literally
nothing to prove;

being drip-fed opioids
to curb the pain
while bleeding to death
into a colostomy
lying on a trolley
in a corridor
in a war zone
in the real world
somewhere.