“The body of the user in a virtual environment is a complex structure, a subject-object…it is a quasi-cyborg body…a body that translates itself into an eminently active spectral entity.”
—Roberto Diodato, The Aesthetics of the Virtual

“Yea, though I walk through the valley in the shadow of death…”

How moon the new
moon
over the uncanny
valley, that vixening

vertigo of simulacra
simpatico
with the mind’s
conflation & eye’s

aphasia of detail
& human
complication. Here
I stand on the street

corner, doubled—
self
shoulder-winged
like all the fallen

egos newly made
mortal, &, again,
in reductive code, a blue
dot nosed by an arrow

where I’m facing,
the surrounding
buildings rendered
by shadow & shade, verging

3D, their ghost
perspective
overlaying the bleed
of neither-here

nor-there. Where
falls
my shadow from
my avatar? Where

lies my ear except
doppelganged
on either side
of my melon, that

volted variable?
The doppler
effect of the past
leaves memory

as flat as a brass
note
from a horn expanded
in the heat. The mirror

silvers a circuitry
of me,
that’s me, I
think. What’s almost

human damns us by its
error
of no error, even this palpable
me in my palm. I belong

to the darkness of
the world—
its haloing street-
lights, the dog

barking to tell me
there
are still
distances I can cross

with my feet, my
hope
like a blister
on my heel, as I try

to find my way
back
to the hotel. How
blood the blood

of the metaphor,
how still
the heart that’s beaten
in fear.