Prose Poem: Off the grid.

 

When I decided to go off the grid,

I didn't tell a single solitary soul.

I wanted to see how long it would be

before my family and friends missed 

my sparkling presence on Twitter 

and Facebook.

I was fed up with the narcissistic malarkey and 

outright falsehoods my social media accounts

were filled with.

So I pulled the plug.

No more emails.

If people wanted to get a hold of

me they could mail me a letter.

Which is what I would do to them.

Or come over to see me.

Or call me on my Tracfone.

Of course, they'd need my new number.

So I sent out a batch of postcards with it.

I had ditched my smartphone

and got myself a Tracfone instead.

Then I sat back and quietly waited.

After a week I began to worry;

didn't anybody miss me?

Was I so insignificant that

not a person on earth cared

I was gone from the internet?

After a month of no responses

I went over to

Crazy Henry's house.

He's my oldest friend.

He answered the door 

and invited me in for 

cornbread and iced tea.

"Miss me much?" I asked him

finally.

"Nope" he said. "Did you go someplace?"

"I'm off the grid" I told him impatiently.

"Have been off it for months!"

Crazy Henry squeezed more lemon

into his iced tea.

"Can't say I noticed" said Crazy Henry.

"I spend all my online time with 

Project Gutenberg, reading old Argosy

stories."

"Well, that's a stupid waste of time" I told him.

He shrugged his shoulders and began

peeling a quince. 

That's when the revelation hit me;

all my friends, all my family,

had been corrupted and maimed

by social media.

Not a one of them could hold up

their end of an intelligent conversation

anymore.

So I said goodbye to Crazy Henry 

and went back home.

And waited.

Waited for intelligence to contact me.

From anywhere. From outer space, even.

I never heard any voices; I never got any postcards.

My phone never buzzed.

I walked down to the drugstore

every day to pick up a newspaper.

You can trust newspapers.

They never get an obituary 

or crossword puzzle wrong.

Finally, a year later, I got a letter

from the National Security Administration.

They wanted to know why I was off the grid.

They were, they wrote, concerned I might

die alone in my house and no one would 

know about it for months.

The letter was personally signed by 

J. Edgar Hoover.

That's when I grew a beard

and began to wear nothing but moccasins.

I moved onto a derelict barge

on the Mississippi.

When The New Yorker writer came by

that winter to do a profile

on me

as "The Last Holdout," 

I told her I was starving and

had rickets. Beri-beri, too.

She bought me food and tried

to get me to drink a bottle of wine

with her.

That's when I knew she was 

a government agent, not a writer

from The New Yorker.

If she were with The New Yorker

she'd get a bottle of cheap gin instead.

I threw a moccasin at her and dove

into the icy Mississippi.

And haven't been heard from since.