TYLER GILLESPIE / 3 POEMS — always crashing

projection of altered landscape onto face

In this new future        can we still want to be desired? Or is that passé?
Seen as weak. I’m asking for a friend. If we fantasize about machines
we do not need to be physically desired by people. This seems ideal. Machines
can be programmed; undone. That’s an ethical gray area for someone else
to contemplate. Now, I’m more focused on my new gray hair. Getting older
is natural & nature is boring.               I’m silly, I know—but no one asked
for this body & you’ve caught me at a bad time          on my way to self-
actualization. See: my friend is now one of those hot gay guys who posts
shirtless #selfies          to thousands of followers on Instagram & gets lots of likes.
I think Baudrillard would have loved the Instagram simulacrum with all
its filters & face tune. People now get plastic surgery to look like their face
tuned pictures in real life.       Such glamor! Fakeness is realer than real
in this future. & I am here for it. We stylize, then project—this seems like
the best way to live because we fashion our bodies into something we recognize.
I’m still wary of posting on socials, though, as I’m not          over being preoccupied
with them as agents of the surveillance state. Anyway, my friend posted a pic
of himself in a speedo, reclining          with the text: suns out, guns out. I tried
to resist, but as of today I’m still not-machine, so I write this poem to alter my
landscape & convince myself I haven’t spent too much time on the internet
or thinking about the moon when I could have had with the sun on my face.

fremont street cam

a type of desire, encoded

Tyler Gillespie is the author of Florida Man: Poems (Red Flag Poetry, 2018) and the nonfiction collection The Thing About Florida (University Press of Florida, 2021).