Virtual reality
 
From the moment you receive a cancer verdict
(cancer is always a verdict, not a diagnosis)
your world brightens up.
Memories fly about
like the windows revolving on a screen saver.
The subconscious of a primitive age wakes up
and comes strutting by, while meteors
flash down from your future up in space.
Darkness banished, light and shade, patterns removed,
thickness, depth and weight abolished,
differences between living on the street with starvation
and a snug bed at home with warm meals obliterated,
all demarcations destroyed,
World of clear bright light.
With the roots of time and the stone hinges of space
eliminated, your reality becomes
a world of cancerous cells,
self-reproducing limitlessly
without distinction between inside and out,
oh, the very height of digital technology,
caught in the trap of a restructuring
designed to weed out the uncompetitive
at the very instant when,
incapable of surviving amidst toxic conditions,
unlike pokeweed, bullfrogs, threadworms, leeches,
they have little by little lost their vitality,
declined into weakness, your life,
a world of pure white light, virtual reality.


Translation in collaboration with Jongsook Lee