I die every single day. It comes slowly, gas leaking out of a tank; a river drying up to a trickle. It has taken years to notice, but here I am: On empty. In a muddy riverbed.
    Standing on the short timeline of my life, I look back at the man of the past. The man is not myself, and yet he is more complete than me. He is younger – yes – but brimming with delight. He knows nothing of Walls and Comments and Likes, and yet he is whole. He has no outlet for his happiness other than his own physical canvas. His sadness is absolute and crushing, but it belongs to him.
I am not he.
I am the autumn of his soul.
There is an emptiness inside me.
    It has not grown like the lines on my face nor the aches in my bones. It is something immeasurable.  
    I want to step out of my own identity.
    I want to live in a construct that is more unique than my own.
    We talk of living vicariously through others, but I live vicariously through myself. I live ten feet behind and thirty seconds after my own person. I watch the man in front of me go through every motion, and I feel nothing. I notate the changes, categorize the achievements, collate the emotions, and I feel nothing. On paper, I look quite good. Great things make headlines. Pictures show unforgettable memories, laughter, joy, and contentment.
    And every feeling of inadequacy, vulnerability, shame, doubt, and fear is greeted with a blind eye.
    The more my construct grows, the more I diminish.
    I am the Portrait of Dorian Gray, reversed.
    Each day the picture is more successful, happy, wealthy, and loved.
    And the man weakens and decays.
    I am frightened of what I’ve become.  
    If there is a way to halt this, I spend every day searching for it. Perhaps, in moments of looking into another’s eyes, I can hide from nothing. At those times, the construct falls away, and the man on the timeline comes crashing into the present.
    I wonder who will greet me in the morning. Will the Man diminish, or will the Portrait grow fainter instead?

You don't limit your life to social media.
In reality, social media limits you to your life.
A selfie with this and a selfie with that.
Your life is race for comments and likes.
Instead of having a personality worth praising
You are now judged based on your social media profiles.

Status update: I wish I could visit Paris some day.
In Paris you're like, "Where can I get signals for wifi?"

Your achievements are unlocking new levels of Candy Crush
Is that the legacy you'll leave behind?
As if all these achievements will benefit you  
to unlock the doors of heaven when you'll die.
Your 940 friends won't be able to help you
by sending a booster or an extra life.

Relationship Status: Happily married.
Happy and married until the moment you both go offline.

You buy everything from behind the screen
Error 404: Cannot buy love and time.
It's a complicated maze that you won't accept
Even when they themselves call it a website.
You don't limit your life to social media.
In reality, social media limits you to your life.

Twitter, youtube
Facebook, snapchat
the world use to be huge,
now it's tiny & flat.

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.

This is for the girls who lie awake at night,
Pulling at the blankets to keep them warm,
Drenched in sins of deprecation.
Tossing and turning on their twin size beds,
because there is not enough room to fit expectations,
let alone their own.
This is for the girls who stare at themselves in front of their mirrors,
Pinching at the extra layers of skin that hang around their tummies.
Rolls of "fat" as they call it, I prefer the term "beauty."
This is for the girls who have shoulders are backs plastered in scars.
From the bras that were one cup size to small, overly adjusted and tightened straps.
This is for the girls who fall prey to the fallacies of magazine stands,
captivated by the cold letters bleeding off the covers:
"Three hundred, sixty-five ways to style your hair!"
"How to get the perfect ****!"
"Turn off the lights to look good naked!"
"How to make him love you!"
Pull apart the flesh, look beneath your skin,
you are not defined by the number of eyes that manifest lust towards you,
you are not the hands that plead to saunter their way toward your hips,
You are not the number of inches that space out your thighs.
Or the visibility of muscle that line up on your stomach.
You do not need to look good naked,
don't turn off the lights.
Your **** looks fine
Stop falling victim to the media
To the photo shopped ads of puppets who look nothing like you
Because your real
and if you want a man to love you, he must learn to accept you
with your extra flaws, our scars, and rolls of fat.
Because that sack of bones known as a model on a Cosmopolitan cover will not keep him warm.
It is inscribed in the atoms that make you a person
you are a three dimensional beautiful masterpiece
you are not a computerized pixelated image
reshaped and resized retouched and revised
stop letting society dehumanize a woman
your a woman
all the fury to slither through you limbs until you shake with and anger and purpose, acknowledge the value of your worth for you are more that just a waste of paper and space, you are space, you are human, your alive, and beautiful

I hate how
we're the generation
who's confidence
can drop
from the number
of likes
on a picture
;

There are too many things
I still want to do with you

Baseball games
in the blistering heat
so I can Instagram our love

Trips to the city
I'll tweet about
just vaguely enough that people wonder
what we did all night
in that big hotel room

Swimming with sharks
getting likes on our Facebook photos
and jealous messages from our friends

Our relationship
was always set to private
I guess I liked it better that way
but whether or not my friends can see it
there are too many things
I still want to do with you

Please don't be done with me yet