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

Overrated ******* cheap bitter whine out of mouths of overworked undereducated individuals searching for achievement
Family nosing into business of other family they don't even speak to but need to know who's better off or worse off so most keep in touch for fake reasons
Friends claiming to be friends even though Bobby slept with Joe's sister Kim when Kim had a baby by Bobby's cousin Jim who's sister beat the *** of that ***** Karley for sharing a photo they were in
In a relationship today because you love to watch the haters hate but make 27 statuses about how ****** ain't **** and how you're 3 months late
Hypocritical comments followed by one hundred twenty seven likes
attached to a photo of a kid that died thirteen years ago twice
but to send a prayer or save a life all you have to do is click
LIKE.

I hardly remember the world before
I wonder what the world will be after

Facebook[.]

Substituting communication
for mere contact.
Self image produced with every shared post.
Basing your worth
on how many tap their finger.

When people become numbers
and reading someone's tweets
is enough to count as friendship

Convincing ourselves that life should have an edit option

Have we forgotten the tangible world?
real and uncut
above the square illusions residing in our hands

as soon as these blue speckled
socks go, that's it. A new bright black death.A solemn weir on a stark horizon.Give me a reason to wear color. My hueless affidavit
runs me into the Earth, where I sprout up
a pallid keb- brain orf'd, you could drag my etiolated ebon
body through the ovine fold or take me to the theater. When I was just a minor teg, I sheared my mim kip, I fuckinggave it to you outright. In this little
cote my wan mien nigrifying; my calamitous black, quaffed full of congou in demitasse, of souchong & saucers. My atrous wethered body albicantly degenerating in the atrous sun. I'm crusting over with wanness and you, you're fortifying in the cwm where I used to yaff and stray. Your ovivorous hunger,something I never knew, when first you came for my jecoral flesh, just another bot digging through my soft toison. Like Dall's Prometheus being sheared from the flock-you cut me away. In this drab and achromic world, you put the wanness in my flesh, the gid in my heart. Still.
Just these blue socks are left.