Our first themed edition,Your Tech Life, continues today with poetry.

 

by Carla Schwartz

That they count themselves among the loved
when they count their thumbs up and hearts,

that they pretend to worry when only one friend comments
she, the one who plays Farmville and speaks Smiley,

that they spill accolades over alcoholic spewers
with words like brilliant, or mention authors like Kant or Nietzsche —

because they all have sunny vacations,
loving friends, families, and pets,

because who would want to post a photo
of a black eye or broken vase,

because when the shit hits the fan,
a dog still smiles for the camera,

because they get psyched when a hero tags them
if they showed up for a gig,

then see all thirty comments on the post
they, with 800 friends, to their hero’s thousands,

because every time they visit Facebook,
awards, children, graduations, congratulations

celebrated with balloons, they wonder,
should they get a spouse, or pet, or child, or try harder? —

because they feel smaller and smaller, lesser and lesser,
even with two new friend requests, (research confirms this),

they don’t know how to respond to death, and because
some Facebook friends are dead, they haven’t changed their privacy settings,

because from the photos and posts it’s evident,
because some Facebook friends seem closer to each other,

than you are to them, because you post and post
and wait for comments that never come,

you keep coming back to Facebook, because when the shit hits
the fan, a dog still smiles for the camera, a cat rolls over in stretch.