Hashtag

A roaring emptiness lingers

In the space between

Our phones and our fingers

It pulls its way through us

Yearning and learning to grow

Learning to flow

A cold-hearted canyon

Born between two mountains of snow

Because the cold in our insides

Taught us how to bridge the gap

Between what happens inside our own heads

And what we put on our Facebook app

You see happiness is currency

Only the rich succeed

We grit our teeth through plastic smiles

While our falsehoods flood your feed.

Well, not falsehoods exactly

Let’s just call them altered truths

But the devils in the details

And details aren’t for you

You see if happiness is currency

Then deception is a warm gun

And we empty out its chambers

Firing bullets by the tonne.

But only from the bright side of a quickly darkened screen

We bash our stories through our thumbs and try to hide what’s real

And that roaring emptiness still lingers,

We can feel it at our backs

We can feel its jaws a-gaping

Its claws flap and snap and crack

So, we update a doctored status

Post a heavily filtered selfie

And we hide behind our hashtags

And our like count feeds their envy

Because we are nothing without our followers

We are empty without likes

We have nothing else to cling to

We are a generation left on ice

We yearn to see a smiley face

We pray for that little heart

Communication down to zero

A forgotten work of art

Because you see, we don’t know how to say we’re sad

And we don’t know that we’re lost

Social media is choking us

We can’t even fathom its cost

With our filtered lives

Forced insta smiles

And safely dishing out our bile

From behind that screen again

We don’t know how to make real friends

And this is what it’s come to

This is what we’re all about

We’ve lost ourselves to a fake façade

Of binary codes and self-doubt

But those thumbs and hearts keep rolling in, the spoils for the devout.

As we worship at this altar formed by others word of mouth