But Your Profile Said...

We take more pictures than breaths we take;

Galleries proliferate, phone memories deteriorate, spaces become faces,

As if our camera-forefathers intended these traces!

We live in an age where we are whitewashed and cleaned

No longer the true embodiment of being,

But, instead, a working of technical mastery,

Mastery of deception,

Mastery for protection,

Protection from social rejection

That focuses on keen inspection.

But what happened to “Don’t judge a book by its cover”?

Where did all the children go,

Whose mamas raised them righteously,

Deliberately shielding them from the horrors within,

Within not society itself,

But in each walking human?

Ah, yes, that percolating tendency to fulfill your needs,

The tendency that I throw out like trash.

Straight to the landfill you go, you wretched fiend!

I am here not as a filter,

Not as a light for your personal shade;

Instead, present as myself, here for me, here for we.

No shame is cast, not ever a glance,

No hope for shadow, no hope for dance;

My blemishes bleed through,

My cracked smile slithers in,

My face casts that one true hue,

A face that is drained by sin.

But am I any different is the question.

Am I any different from the countless numbers of fakes,

Frauds, lies, disguises, fabricators, and veils of portentousness?

No, we all lie behind our filters.

The only difference is that some dismiss that self-consciousness,

And let go of social constraints.

That’s what we’re looking for:

Honesty amongst the deceits.

I have no shame to cast.

I am an emitter of truth.

The only filter that hides me is that which simplifies me.

When we are broken down, down to our basic contours,

Only then do we get that naked sensation,

Not naked like the social discomfort,

But naked as in true beauty,

True beauty that the biters of fruit threw away for knowledge,

True beauty that we throw away for acceptance,

For the “likes” and the “thumbs ups”, and the “re-tweets”,

And all that other sickening disorder that runs our lives.

Ask any youth in modern-day America:

“What’s your favorite filter?”

And the poor chap contemplates with utmost carefulness.

Now reverse that order and what you get is extreme madness:

Ask the child to post a picture of something of his own desire,

And surely, without a shadow of doubt, there comes the polarizer of truth.

So sad, that what we always had,

Was a fabrication of a fad.

A fad for the bad which to this day stains our lads.

I stand amongst this disheveled crowd,

Guiding the light through the twists of this dank tunnel,

A tunnel that leads not to complexities of fate,

Complexities of simplicity, complexities of truth,

But to the barren land, to the bare lads,

To the ever-breathing stories of Scheherazade.

Tell one more story, we are all waiting.

Waiting for your next trick, world.

Waiting, and waiting, and…