(Dedicated to Philip K. Dick)

What if the Internet is an android’s dream,
and we are the electric sheep?

Dick would know at once
our artificial people:
every boy a Roy,
every girl a pleasure model,
trying to pass as real,
inwardly concerned with their design —
“Morphology. Longevity. Incept dates.”

On Facebook,
“More Nolan than Nolan”
is my motto.

If I, in my genuine moments,
could greet my jpeg face
hiding in his electronic words,

he’d go offworld or die.
After all,
“It’s not an easy thing to meet your maker.”

[Author’s note — the film quoted and paraphrased above is Ridley Scott’s “Blade Runner” (1982), to which this poem is an homage.  “Blade Runner” is itself an adaptation of Dick’s 1968 novel, “Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?”]

(c) Eric Robert Nolan 2016

Photo credit: By olga.palma – facebook enganchaUploaded by JohnnyMrNinja, CC BY 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=16525385