Internet Time Machine

Art Is a Facebook Status About Your Winter Break

A poem for the internet

This story is part of the Internet Time Machine, a collection about life online in the 2010s.

I swear to every heaven ever imagined,
if I hear one more dead-eyed hipster
tell me that art is dead, I will personally summon Shakespeare
from the grave so he can tell them every reason
why he wishes he were born in a time where
he could have a damn Gmail account.
The day after I taught my mother
how to send pictures over iPhone she texted
me a blurry image of our cocker spaniel ten times in a row.
Don’t you dare try to tell me that is not beautiful.
But whatever, go ahead and choose to stay in
your backwards-hopping-all-inclusive club
while the rest of us fall in love over Skype.
Send angry letters to state representatives,
as we record the year’s first sunrise so
we can remember what beginning feels like when
we are inches away from the trigger.
Lock yourself away in your Antoinette castle
while we eat cake and tweet to the whole universe that we did.
Hashtag you’re a pretentious asshole.
Van Gogh would have taken 20 selflies a day.
Sylvia Plath would have texted her lovers
nothing but heart-eyed emojis when she ran out of words.
Andy Warhol would have had the world’s weirdest Vine account,
and we all would have checked it every morning while we
Snapchat our coffee orders to the people
we wish were pressed against our lips instead of lattes.
This life is spilling over with 85-year-olds
rewatching JFK’s assassination and
7-year-olds teaching themselves guitar over YouTube videos.
Never again do I have to be afraid of forgetting
what my father’s voice sounds like.
No longer must we sneak into our family’s phonebook
to look up an eating disorder hotline for our best friend.
No more must I wonder what people in Australia sound like
or how grasshoppers procreate.
I will gleefully continue to take pictures of tulips
in public parks on my cellphone
and you will continue to scoff and that is okay.
But I hope, I pray, that one day you will realize how blessed
you are to be alive in a moment when you can Google
how to say I love you in 164 different languages.

B. E. Fitzgerald is a poet. Read more of her work here.

Keep exploring the Internet Time Machine.