Oh my lord, these messages
regarding novel technology
But how original is it really?

Aura, heavenly choir
echoes, booming through your living room
and creeping into your bedroom laptop
The religion is now available in a watch
The weight of this phone and the distractions she invites
I feel like a past man, a robber baron
displaced in his longest dream, and it’s terrifying
that there are past lives
I’m not sure how I’ll deal with the flashing images
which describe everything I ever done

A Note to myself and You:
NEVER ANSWER A TROLL.

“Don’t feed the Trolls” they say,
So don’t reply to them.
(Delete or block them if you can).

Let their bile or guile stand alone,
So that others can see
What bad people they are.

Ignore them completely.
Leave them to drown in the Silence.

Paul Butters

as the silken webs stick to you
an ignorant bliss is written in your eyes
you are stricken by a venom inflicted
you're caught in a web of lies

there's a difference between visible and hidden
a difference between spiders and flies
you're a victim of innocence once bitten
you're caught in a web of lies

I am glad I lived this long
So I could be on the internet.
I always wanted a ****** life
And though I haven’t got there yet
I am close, I can see it now
Throngs and hordes of ***** people;
Hundreds want to ****** me.
Several sites want to enlarge me,
I blush, nobody wants to reduce me.

I get fifty or so messages a day
Telling me how hot they are.
They treat me like I am a king
Or a kind of ****** superstar.
Calling me like sirens on rocks
They do, at least, until I get
To the part where I must pay
To get laid on the internet.

I have asked enough questions
Some of them embarrassing
To get the idea and understand
Why it’s me they are harassing.
By even clicking on their site
I’ve proved that I am a fool.
They say to themselves, I’m sure
“Will you look at this gullible tool?

Oh, and the promises they make!
They will rock my world with a word.
They will tell me the hottest things
That a schmuck like me ever heard.
But to clear the air, when they ask
For card numbers I don’t make a peep.
I am as ***** as a drunken rabbit
But first and foremost, I am cheap.

So many relationships like bad business partnerships:
green bottles falling from walls; messages stuck in bottles
rotating in great gyres; swallows never at home North or South.
(Anti-Confessional? — It’s a fashionable trend just now
and yet what is it not to confess, when we claim authorship?)

Suburbia’s flat evenness suffocates (but I’ve repeated this
so many times and I’m still here!).
We need to find the cracks in which to grow, in which to place,
our errant thoughts like rude whispers in a darkened room,
and nobody about to hear you anyway!

We express ourselves well in silence but me, I gyrate,
not quite on one side or the other, a kind of even fullness,
or, that’s what I like to think, let’s get this straight:
I’m an uncouth wind against plains that offer no obstacles.
Better to wear me that way — it saves the snap under pressure.

Raised on instant gratification
rewarded for *******  
spread out on our screens
society based on ratings

Like bad movie critics,
we send mixed signals to artists
confuse our creatives
and give pleasure to mediocracy

We’re old souls
in new bodies with prosthetic limbs of plastic and glass
extensions of our memories and minds
we’ve built a reliance on them

One day when the sky cracks in half
satellites will fall from space
we will all be crushed by
The fruits of our progress
killing us slow.

Little Lolly LOL is not too bright
She types LOL day and night
She seems to think that abbreviation is
To replace things like parenthesis,
Or hahaha, hello or goodbye.
She uses it constantly, don’t know why.
The way she uses it is a blight.
As I have said, she’s not too bright.

We never met, Little Lolly and I
But it’s almost as if I can hear it;
Her ending every single sentence
With LOL as if it were a period.
She can be chatting about ******
Disease or crooked officials
But she manages to end it with
Those silly, mirthful initials.

Little Lolly LOL I am sure totally fails
To understand what she has said.
I even tried a few times to get
The idea into her fluttery head.
But to her, she is being ‘with it’,
To her it’s just like saying ‘whatever’.
And that it means laughing out loud?
She never quite puts that all together.

With Little Lolly LOL, that is the price
One has to pay for her friendship.
To be sure, she’s not being funny.
LOL is punctuation, not a valid quip.
She saw and somebody explained it
So, she grabbed it and she uses it.
It never occurred to her addled brain
That there was any way to abuse it.