I don’t want to be friends with Instagram anymore.
All those women slapping each other in Walmart.
Those Karens on the debased boulevard.
All those big breasted, ball busting lovers.
I am not interested in pretty sunsets in Bali and the Vermont foliage in November.
Everything so pretty and disgusting
I want to die.
And yet I go back every morning when I’m on the train,
carrying the dog, driving the car.
Instagram called me a racist.
Instagram called me a dopey monkey.
Instagram made me lose a dollar and then forty.
I want to break up with you
and we are not even lovers.
And then I see Matty with his balls in the frame
singing Wintering and I think, I love winter so much
I love Matty that much,
I should go outside and be in winter
in the snow the chill the freeze the ice
but I don’t.
I stay inside with my fingers on the phone and click and click
like I am going to get somewhere beyond the dopiness of my own mind.
The other day I heard a guy on TV say there is a building full of 300 people
trying to figure out content for kids.
To keep the kids on the phone, the screen, connected,
away from the outside.
It made me sick like the first time I saw porn made me sick.
I needed to get somewhere quick—into the foliage,
into the sunset, into the cold freeze of winter
in Paris—
like those Instagram photos I scroll through
when I am driving to pick up my kids
and can’t keep my eyes on the road.

*

Matthew Lippman is the author of six poetry collections. His latest book Mesmerizingly Sadly
Beautiful (2020) is published by Four Way Books. It was the recipient of the 2018 Levis Prize. His
next collection, We Are All Sleeping With Our Sneakers On, will be published by Four Way Books
in 2024.