PLAYING GOD SO I CAN
WATCH THE WORLD BURN
I used to play SimCity
on the library computer,
tasked with designing
my own miniature metropolis.
The object was world prosperity
inside a Macintosh screen,
but it was more amusing
to build things in a faulty manner:
Skyscrapers toppled over,
freeways ramps led cars
over steep cliffs,
railroad tracks fed into schools,
and brushfires spread across a land
where fatalities outnumbered births
as smoke rose above the horizon
and a swirl of tornados
twisted people into the center
of my wild adolescent doomsday.
Years passed and I graduated
to playing a popular game
from the makers of SimCity
called The Sims, tasked with
designing my own household,
populated by a family
who I tortured in a funhouse hell.
They’d go insane, their hands
waving up in the air,
screaming in a language
I couldn’t understand
at my sadistic wrath until
the inevitable Mountain Dew
fueled Judgement Day came.
I grew up watching the world
build itself up and break down
again and again, which made me
think God was a kid somewhere,
treating the earth like a toy,
unwilling to fix its disasters,
laughing down on it with contempt.
And God didn’t need any of my help.
Kevin Ridgeway‘s latest book is Death of the Coppertone Girl (Luchador Press). His work has appeared in Hiram Poetry Review, New York Quarterly, Paterson Literary Review, Gargoyle, Slipstream, Chiron Review, Nerve Cowboy, Heavy Feather Review, San Pedro River Review and Trailer Park Quarterly, among others. A Pushcart and Best of the Net nominee, he lives and writes in Long Beach, CA.
