I send this message to my Facebook friends
hoping our like-ship never ends,
the agreeing comments and sharing too,
this approbation which comes through you.

I send this message to my Facebook friends
keen to join in one of the popular trends:
it’s National Poetry Day so I’m writing in verse,
my own ideas and not a newspaper search.

I send this message to my Facebook friends –
not the causes my posting usually defends,
and rather than a sonnet this set of quatrains
with digs at social media its satirical refrains.

I send this message to my Facebook friends
like a surviving library with books it still lends
after cuts – sorry, I fell in an onomatopoeic trap
of sharing heartfelt ideas others consider crap.

I send this message to my Facebook friends
without pictures of mac ‘n’ cheese or burnt ends,
no towering burgers, or platters of ribs and steak,
but a selfie of me in a hot-tub at a seaside break.

I send this message to my Facebook friends,
a public act of trust for the privacy it transcends:
insights or just asides perhaps best left unsaid
if adrift in cyberspace unliked as if an undead.

I send this message to my Facebook friends
with an apology to make some amends
for a preceding stanza so stark and serious
when it isn’t de rigour to post the imperious.

I send this message to my Facebook friends
hoping its mix of wry truths recommends
poetic warm readings with an incline to care,
tasty memoranda a metaphor to tear and share.

Sharing this here, a NPD poem I posted on Facebook: in a previous posting I urged people to ‘message’ poems to one another, this being about as apt a facility out there to fully utilise the theme of messages for this day. I’ll never know how many did.