FB Is My New BF

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I look up my webpage

and it says, Sorry,

what you’re looking for isn’t here.

The girl of your dreams. Wads of cash.

Your mommy. What is here

is Facebook, your new best friend.

When the story about the woman

who bit her boyfriend’s tongue clean off

broke, I thought, Sweet,

and wrote so on Facebook, but

got only two Likes, one from a girl in Biloxi

whose ancestors, I heard, cannibalized

— she’d stare at people, then snap out of it,

saying, Sorry, I’m hungry —

and one from my husband

who Likes even wolfscapes.

It’s like getting a laugh, he says

on the phone from his office

to me on the phone in mine

though we’re just down the hall

in the same house.

Yeah, I say,

until you get the laugh’s for someone else

and no one’s heard you

because no one knows you.

My six-year-old dates a seven-year-old

when he logs on to Club Penguin from home

and she from her mother’s iPad

so her avatar penguin and his avatar penguin

can avatar kiss — who needs to talk,

to forge feeling and story

into meaning and symbol,

a longing scrubbed in light?

At the quote unquote home where my sister lives

with the other quote unquote clients,

they sit around a large ashtray

in a green courtyard, the birds singing,

looking off into middle distance, dragging on smoke

in long breaths of thought

listening to voices in their heads

quip about who’s the real nut job

or who needs to jump in front of a train

and real quick before the Jesus in the TV

takes all the antipsychotics, sedatives, and hypnotics

so no one hears one more voice.

Hell, if it weren’t for the ashtray

they’d never see each other.