Boy meets girl,
Gives her a whirl,
Log on, take selfie,
Update fakebook,
Thumbs up, look!
Had breakfast, look!
Update fakebook,
Went to the gym, look!
Update fakebook,
Now we're gym junkies,
Upload selfies,
Update fakebook,
Thumbs up, look!
Now we're wed,
Enough said,
Update fakebook,
Thumbs up, look!
Shall I kiss the bride?
Not fair, fat and wide!
First, update fakebook,
Thumbs up, look!
Now we've got kids,
Marriage on the skids,
Oh, man, that's bad,
Divorce selfies, too sad,
Update your fakebook,
Thumbs down, look!
Our 21st Century,
Celluloid selfies..........

When I've written something deep;
When I really want your attention;
And I need you to read it with emotion,
With my feelings and my voice;
And I'm hoping you get my meaning,
Because I think you need help,
I use asterisks.
Asterisks.
Ever look closely at an asterisk?
Draw one.
Enlarge it on your screen.
Notice any resemblance to anything you own,
Anyone you know?
It looks like the
*Selfie of an *******.

Botox on the high street
A jab for flabby jowls.
Is it any wonder people
Exist only in their heads?

Social media selfies taken
From above in unnatural light.
Is it still shocking people
Hate the boring everyday?

It's not easy to like yourself
In a world obsessed with image.

My poem is my true selfie,
An X-ray of the inner me,
A snap-shot of reality,
A close-up of what's really me,
Un-shopped pixels of beauty.
Me.

The geosynchronous
Geppetto One
With us orbits
Round our sun;
Blinking down,
Ringing up,
We're on lines
Like marionettes;
Transmitting selfies,
Receiving otheries.
Time to be Pinnochio,
Cut some ties,
Get up and go,
See eye to eye
When toe to toe,
Watch how small
Our noses grow.

I have memories
That could be mine,
Selfies of other times.
Gray matter shots
That morph and shift,
Blur and smear
Yet shine.

My phantom snaps
Have smoke and mirrors,
Spectres with borders.
The smell of bacon,
A rising sun,
A carpet hill
To lay upon;
A door that swings
To past future,
A window to see through.

My astral albumn
Haunts my nights,
No light can dim my view.
I think my thoughts
Are photoshopped.
These memories of you.

The world is conceited, that's easy to see.
People as a whole living egotistically.
We live in an era of self-image, self-lust.
We create a fabric of our lives that's just not us.
We show ourselves as beautiful and hide from the flaws.
When the flaws are what make us, no matter how small.
So stop living behind a vanity screen and face the world without fear.
Someone will find you beautiful, the love of your life, drawn near.
To the flaws and imperfections they can't see behind a screen.
Taking selfies isn't helping.
You're somebody's dream.

We want to see ourselves
see ourselves
because we're afraid that nobody else will
ever want to capture us
in a camera flash- so we take our own pictures.

Click. Our front camera becomes
the one minute we had hoped our fathers had for us
when he wasn't busy on that same phone, speaking,
not clicking. Without us.

Or it becomes the one minute we had hoped
that our lovers would hold us
before they settled on to someone
with more likes,
more comments,
more friends,
more happiness...
than we could ever wait for.

We are impatient
like the frequency of data on our profiles:
here are our feelings now... here
are our feelings again, five minutes later,
performing for social algorithms
in place of photographers
besides ourselves who
see ourselves.

But our ignited pixels,
and overstuffed inboxes,
and masturbatory statuses,
and glittering timelines,
and social everything-

are popularity contests
that all of us are losing.

Yet still we want to see ourselves
see ourselves
even though we are afraid
of what we know is true...

...Because what difference
is a poem to a tweet
besides the number of characters
that we wish we had to populate our own stories?

Please let us be different,
just like everyone else.