"My computer is haunted" sounds like a joke, the sort of thing you mutter when a laptop freezes. By the time Ernesto Priego's poem finishes, the joke has become something tender and a little eerie. The computer is haunted because it is playing the voice of Sylvia Plath, and the speaker can do nothing but stop and listen.
The central idea is that a recorded voice can make a dead person feel present in a way the printed page cannot. The speaker has only ever read Plath, never met her, yet her voice arrives "right now, so clearly, so present and close." The poem circles a question it refuses to answer: "How can one long for someone one never met?" The longing is real enough to make the speaker shiver, and the poem treats that as strange and worth taking seriously.
The form helps create this hush. The poem is free verse with no regular metre, and many lines stand alone as their own stanzas. The long, flat line "There is no option but to stop doing everything and listen" sounds like an instruction to oneself. It is followed by the fragment "The voice." The white space around those two words works like the silence in a room just as a recording starts.
Words of presence recur: "here," "now," "present," "close." Priego then coins the compound "always-present-continuous," borrowing a grammar term, the tense of things that are happening, and stretching it into a description of a voice that never finishes. The line breaks in the Plath sentence are also worth slowing down for. "Forever alive not on her poems" almost says she is not alive in her poems at all, and only the next lines ("on the printed page, / but on the recording") correct it. It is a bold preference for sound over print, and a little ironic, since we meet the idea on a page.
The poem's only simile is also its title: "The city melts like sugar." It stands alone, unexplained. Judging by the imagery, the outside world loses its solidity as the voice takes hold. Sugar dissolves quietly, without a struggle, and it is both sweet and fragile, so the line holds pleasure and loss together.
The pronouns shift as well. The questions use the formal, general "one": "How can one snap out of it, / as if nothing had happened." That is a way of keeping the feeling at arm's length. Then "I" breaks through: "Nobody can tell what I lack." This line also brings the poem's only rhyme, *lack* and *back*, in "The recorded voice brings the dead back." In an otherwise unrhymed poem, the sudden chime sounds like a charm or a spell, as if the poem wants its belief to sound like a certainty. Yet the next line quietly admits the illusion: the dead live again "as if they had never left." The words "as if" show the speaker knows it is only a feeling.
The ending returns to the opening sentence, "My computer is haunted," which now sounds less like a joke and more like a plain description. The final line has no verb: "The ghost of a leaf, ghost of a bird." It is two images, both delicate and both vanishing. A leaf can also mean a sheet of paper, so it may hint at the ghost of the page, and a bird may suggest song, or voice. That is an inference from the imagery, but the line works without it. The poem ends on fading things rather than on comfort.
This is what makes the poem significant. It captures a very modern kind of closeness, in which we meet the dead through speakers and screens and feel real grief for people we know only as words and sound. Priego does not explain that feeling or tidy it away. He admits that nobody can say exactly what the speaker lacks, and he lets the voice go on playing.