Orán McCormack-Grant (Write Here, Write Now/ 2nd level finalist)

And now for Orán’s WRITE HERE, WRITE NOW entry ...

Nothing Left To Be Seen
I don’t recall a time,
when there was no such thing as “online”
I’ve grown up with the world at my finger tips,
Social media and calls on face-time.

For me the internet is a great place,
I’m aware of the dangers too,
I mostly use it for networking,
Keep the real stuff for friends in school.

Snap-Chat, Face-book
and Twitter on the go,
I get some weird invites,
which I ignore or say no,
The sight of naked people,
photoshopped to the last,
I show them to my mother,
her reaction gets me a laugh.

My brother sends me in a link,
here take a look at this,
The stuff is off the Richter scale,
but it has me laughing in fits,
Then I get the call from him,
why did you tell the mother?
He got a call from her today,
to say he was this-that and the other.

I laugh even harder at him being in trouble,
I tell him I’m the golden child,
We laugh at how I’m going to burst Mothers bubble,
And for a while I will go wild.

Mother reminds him he is twenty-four,
and I am almost thirteen,
He tells her Ma, when I was his age
there was nothing left to be seen,
It’s because of him my phone and pc
are on permanent random checks
The internet has parental control,
and the password I don’t have yet!

I don’t know phone numbers off the top of my head,
like they knew them years ago,
I know the date of my own birthday,
all the rest I have in my phone.
If I lost my phone, or my battery went dead,
I would not know where to go,
Sure I’d have to engage that part of my brain
that I have never known.

Moving on to the fake profiles and news,
sure you couldn’t make the stuff up.
But what about the stuff that’s real,
like tweets from Donald Trump.
The reports of road carnage, before families know,
and trial by social media,
Jobs of all types up for grabs,
sure you can even join the mafia.

Competitions and false advertising,
Food pictures, some appetising.
Rude comments, nasty keyboard warriors,
Online shopping delivered by couriers.
Indeed the internet is diverse,
connecting the whole universe.
Information we cannot efface,
Once entered cannot be erased,
You can close an account in an attempt to refrain,
in cyber space it will remain.

Dating sites are all too familiar,
P.O.F, Connecting Singles and Tinder
You can swipe left or right
and head out for the night,
But so often the date is sinister,
and look nothing like they did in their picture.

The amount of online crime,
details took from social-media timelines.
It’s there for the world to view,
to display them is stupid of you,
Emails from long-lost relations
needing cash for a heart operation.
Or the best one yet, my uncle in Tibet,
left all to me, his only relation.


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