Doubtless quite soon they’ll calculate
That limited to meeting in
A simulacrum of The Real,
Some electronic Platospace,
People denied meeting their friends
And family and clearly see
The buggers stood across the room
Will then think no one else exists.
What we can’t sense or smell or touch
Will ratchet back to broadcast lies,
A phoned face futilely fake news,
More bollocks from the Internet,
And this process of disbelief,
They’ll calculate, the way they do,
Will take from nine months to a year
To achieve full Solipsism.
That said, such calculators flee
From rigour, as all humans must,
And make this shit up in their heads
Like philosophers long ago,
Their minds the perfect hermitage,
Their skulls the thickest prison walls,
An isolation hospital
For selfishness on cosmic scales.
Though far from us, the trees still flinch
In dank, unpeopled forest gloom,
Each time another loved one falls,
Unobserved by human pride,
And mighty oak trees mutely weep
In mourning for the broken ash
In their xylem and their phloem
That throb with tears rightly unheard.