No Filter

This is me; here I sit
growing into my aged jacket
accepting my invisibility.
Rebuking my fragility.
Am I irrelevant?
Wearing my wrinkles as a sackcloth and ashes.
Should I reinvent
myself for the applause
of the social media masses?

Twits twittering on Twitter
showcasing shells on Insta
scrolling and trolling
perfecting personas on FB,
a photoshopping melée.

A veil of airbrushed sadness.
I need more because I am less.
Filtering faces and not words,
subsisting on praises,
captive in "like" cages.

A pound of flesh under the knife,
erasing evidence of a lived life.
Fattening up my lips and ass,
a fatted calf,
as a stranger berates me in the looking glass.

Are my eyebrows "on fleek"?
Am I scathingly "savage" enough?
Am I too "woke" or not enough?
I log in and await your critique.
Let's celebrate the cover, not the book.
Post a pic as the panel rates you.
Have an opinion and we hate you.
Losing our humanity on the Book.

I have wandered the London streets
donning my expiry as an invisibility cloak.
As the gaze of the "lit" quickly retreats,
before dissolving into the city's big smoke
I have sat with Eliot as we shared despair
after shop-worn shared niceties
over "tea and cakes and ices".
Exchanging troughs and peaks as we
laughed and cried
Bitching with Bukowski; waving to Sylvia
as we died.

Empty voices filling the space with speech,
their flawless faces behind a screen.
Me, out of touch.They, out of reach.
Where reality and the virtual scheme,
I have haunted the void in-between.

Should I question the truth whilst believing the lie?
The hordes flock to Tik Tok,
Famous for fifteen minutes
to shock, to rock, to mock,
to exhibit without limits.
But I am old and the light in their eyes has died.