Poem: A Modest Proposal for the Internet Age

There is a version of you
already walking around out there.

She has good lighting.
He is a series of clean paragraphs.
They speak in sentences that arrive
fully dressed.

No one interrupts them.
No one misquotes them.
No one catches the moment
before the thought lands.

They do not hesitate.
They do not circle back.
They do not say,
“Wait, that’s not what I meant.”

This version of you
does not exist in your kitchen
or your car
or the quiet ten minutes
before sleep.

Still, she is convincing.

She has been liked.
Shared.
Saved for later
by people who will not remember
where they found her.

Meanwhile,

you forget what you were saying
mid-sentence.
You start projects you never return to.
You carry conversations in your body
long after they’ve ended.

You revise yourself
in the shower.
You win arguments
three days late.

There is no algorithm for that.

No one clicks
on the unfinished version.
No one bookmarks
the moment you changed your mind
and did not announce it.

And yet,

this is the only place
anything real has ever happened.

Not in the caption,
but in the pause before it.
Not in the post,
but in the hour you spent
deciding whether to speak at all.

The Internet will continue
to assemble you
from fragments.

A sentence here.
A photograph there.
A tone someone will misunderstand
and carry with them
as if it were complete.

You will be summarized
by people who have never
heard your voice in a room.

You will be known
in ways that are technically accurate
and entirely untrue.

This is not a problem
to be solved.

It is a condition.

So—

wash your cup.
answer the email you’ve been avoiding.
tell the truth
in the next small conversation
that asks it of you.

Let your life become
slightly more aligned
with the person
who appears so effortlessly
on a screen.

Not perfectly.
Not all at once.

Just enough
that if someone were to meet you
without context,
without history,
without the archive—

they would recognize you.

And if they didn’t,
you would not feel the need
to explain.

Now,

go and become the person
you want the Internet to think you are.

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