It Is Pitch Dark

You are likely to be eaten by a grue
If this predicament seems particularly cruel
Consider whose fault it could be:
Not a torch or a match in your inventory

It got narrated at you in the second person
Every time you booted up, it seemed you got another version
Of your life told to you by a status line blinking
The impossible people you could be without thinking
Yourself insane of personality problems
With a mop on a drop ship or trying to stab a goblin
That don’t play in public life. You get arrested
Psychoactive medication daily in your big intestine
And attesting that the voices in your head
Said the dwarf shot first, embedded arrow then you bled
But doctors with needles posit repeatedly
That you knocked down that midget in the park unneededly
This has seeded the idea that you should
Never venture from the house, never get misunderstood
By the non-player characters inhabiting Earth
None of whom are too concerned about Nord & Bert
Not one of whom ever aimed a fish around the room
Trying to get it in the ear canal because doom
Beset the last planet they were on, or near
The verge of a set of poetics they wouldn’t hear
Never peered at the clues with invisible ink
No SM goddesses ever gave them pause to think
Never piloted six robots, each distinct
Don’t matter how many 2-liters they drink
They’re not gonna follow what you’re saying at all
They impugn and appall in the scope of their gall
As you hide in your room in disgust with the lights turned out
Turn ‘em on in a turn. Leave ‘em off for now

You read a pamphlet from a mailbox that urges low cunning
Offers cursor and prompt: type >run and you’re running
And parses what you tell it, pronouns intact
Abbreviations if you need ‘em (better keep it gramat.)
Better punctuate your sentences and never redact
The name of anything ambiguous. You’re about to get asked
Do you mean the red one, the round one, the crooked, or the blue?
Better keep that in your pocket, don’t know yet what it could do
Could be the spray for the grue; you’re gonna need it if it is —
A situation that reloads, restarts, or quits
Wonder how many points out of how many points
You’ve got to get before you’re done. Endeavor then to rejoice
When you wish more ardently, identities shed
For continuance, the rhyme forever voyaging. Fled
From all lights and colors, from all smells and sound:
Just the lyric on the monochrome display and you’re proud
To make another verse appear by solving riddles
If you didn’t have to sleep, you know you’d never seek acquittal
You’d be ever in the middle and the midst of a quest
If it weren’t for >don the gown. you’d never get dressed
In your underwear typing, just like Front
Keyboard attached up to my fingers — wrists bear the brunt —
As I seek to do stunts simply through their descriptions
I think I went once to some sands that were Egyptian
And I retain plane tickets, snapshots, receipts
Yet I stand unconvinced that this has happened to me
I wouldn’t want to misremember or get confused
Recall of crawling towards a pyramid appearing over dunes
Recall of entering the thing and descending stairs
Does it descend from there, adventure to nightmare?
Did I battle a snake? Was the treasure intact?
Or did the TRS-80 in my brain get hacked?
Thanks, Grampa, for buying it. Now my life’s ruined
Twenty-two years later, head’s infested: got the grue in
PLUGHing, XYZZYfying, trying to escape
But I can’t ‘cause I’m up and around and awake