By Colby Malsbury

(With apologies to Alfred Noyes and The Highwayman)

The time was four in the morning – the place Mom’s downstairs den.

The Net was a ghastly cauldron of rampant fear porn…..again.

The Nerd was at his laptop, carrying the war forth true.

And the Narrative kept trending….

Trending….trending….

The Narrative kept trending, like a rock in your favorite shoe.

The Nerd was drench’d in stink-sweat, watching Twitter scroll by.

The Narrative was mass starvation – surely we must all die!

Staged TikTok vids of empty shelves were all the needed proof!

And he choked on his Cheetos in choler….

Nearly woke his mom with a holler….

And on he continued to waller, through the epic online spoof.

O’er the hashtags he clambored, like Bigfoot out for a stroll.

Ukraine, and Trudeau, and Brandon, and Climate, and Occult at the Super Bowl.

But then he heard a tuneful ‘ding!’ – and whose icon should be there?

Twas Lark, his online girlfriend!

An honest-to-goodness girlfriend!

Well, sorta-kinda girlfriend – the best he’ll get from his chair.

The couple were not gamers – they were of the Online Right.

They found common cause in triggering libs, tho only the Nerd was white.

Lark proposed a snarky spree on one of Pelosi’s threads.

And so they went to spamming….

Really got the wi-fi jamming….

With Feel Guy memes so damning! Hey….shouldn’t they be in bed?

Till break of day the libs came forth in all-caps caterwauling.

The Nerd twitched in his chair with glee, in danger of free-falling.

Little did he realize that he was merely prompting bots.

And so they gathered up his data….

Which he provided them pro rata….

In all the yada yada, the Nerd didn’t connect the dots.

Ads customized to meet his wants immediately appeared.

Yet the Nerd paid no attention, for o’er Lark he leered.

They were considered hooked up, in cyberspace parlance.

For she heart-reack’d all his posts….

And GIF’d him to the utmost….

And once he’d seen her eat toast during a two-way Zoom trance.

She DM’d him a message, saying she had to make confession.

His ears perked up like a Husky pup – truly a yeet Net session!

Said she: ‘Nerd, I know you are the furthest thing from soy.

‘So without inhibition….

‘Herein is my condition….

‘I’m really in transition…for I was born a boy.’

As you can well imagine, this news hit like a bomb.

Tho since it was now 9 AM, his yell did not wake Mom.

Why could “she” not be frank with him these many weeks before?

Oh, and by the bye…

“Her” ethnic’ty was Thai…

So why o why o why did the Nerd expect much more?

So the Nerd, as was his wont, proceeded to quite the fit.

As his laptop was his trouble source, the screen he scratched and bit.

He spit and screeched and swore and spazzed and tossed cushions asunder.

I’m not being sadistic!

It was lit’rally quite autistic…

Approaching the near-mystic, was this fabled thunder.

But then upon reflection, the Nerd realized something.

That Lark could be any ol’ Baal of his own mind’s contriving!

What kids once formed with Play-Dough is now done with OS script.

They are all gods of creation

Forming their own idyll nation.

Societal masturbation – the new Babel Encrypt.

So the Nerd told Lark he loved him/her, and they started to converse

About the means to expose to all Zuckerberg’s Metaverse.

Instagram pics? A group on Gab? A subthread o’er on Reddit?

Little did they realize….

Realize…realize…

The Metaverse? Pssst, guys….you’re already enslaved within it.