Against Instagram Face

A Brief Poem.

She knew that as she aged the years would continue to pass by with an expeditious nature.

Ephemeral emblems she could not touch due to their abstraction, but instead felt beneath the fleeting pulse of changing seasons.

She watched through the mirror as the amalgamation of time past and present melted the skin on her face and molded a new found confidence into the spirit.

The lines around her mouth, the crease between her eyes, and the furrows across her forehead symbolized the insignia of life, its triumphs and its tragedies. They were badges of honor to be worn with pride.

With this understanding, she could finally exhale, release the pressure valve of outside chatter and consumerist warfare, and exist closer to a truer rhythm of life, free from imposed misogynistic delusions.

Yet there was a time she tried to deny this process with the various predatory cures:

Lotions

Potions

Needles

Lasers

Knives

This Mundane routine she enacted out of an inflicted coercion she could not quite place…A hypnotized beckoning to hack into the face.

Until it resembled that of a commercialized conformity, you know the look… the one plastered on each screen blinding with its artificial hue.

Or in more precise terms: Instagram Face.

A pathetic imitation of pedophilic beauty standards, almost comical in its absurdity. Yet before one can laugh, the impulse is eclipsed by pity at the sight of a vacant stare, a soul mutilated beyond expression, deceived by the parasitic beast that is the beauty industry.

It can no longer express, deprived of all human quality, the entrancing turmoil of joy or the necessary lulls of grief, instead remaining frozen forever in its objectification and consequent degradation.

This newly modern face is stripped of all unique traits, insecurity triumphed over what one day… With time and a shedding of self-hating programming, could have transformed into the newfound spirit of confidence she once conjured in the mirror, proudly observing ….

That molding

That melting

Of Life.