Facebook is Borg

a poem by NNOROM AZUONYE

 

This spectre invades your life. A vampire fly,

proboscis latches on to your navel. It sucks and sucks,

sucks you into itself. It is a monstrous quicksand.

 

Every cell in your brain initially rejects Facebook

and you abhor those contemptible colleagues who have

become one with the collective; those vain, infantile,

boredom-whipped pizza-munching slobs sharing lifeless lives

with strangers in that blue time-killing kingdom

of the work-droughted insecure God-forsaken dolts.

 

Then one morning you take leave of your senses

or your senses take leave of you, whichever is foolisher,

you accept the frigging invitation and begin to feel

the full force of social network voodoo; There’s a fan page

for Seven of Nine’s chest zone, Spock, the great Worf

and everything else under the stars.

 

You even get a chance to airbrush your sorry life.

You offer no resistance at all, secretly wishing you could,

but really don’t want to, and you yield, poor mortal,

resistance is futile. Facebook is Borg.

 

Fully conscripted now. Enslaved. Screwed-up,

you earnestly build your home a-web from home,

reconnect with old times, old mates, and old flames.

Discover who’s made it and who’s fallen off the S.U.V.

You collect friends of every colour, male, female,

dual-gendered, straight, bent, asexual, hot and cold,

rich and poor, the famous, wannabes and the nameless –

you collect them all, even those Satan-loving bigots

tributing pages to cold-blooded murderers and bandits.

You gather them like a cursed collector of wandering spirits.

You take all the monsters into your home.

 

Thanks to Google, Bing, Yahoo! and their search boxes,

you scrub the web for words of the wise. Paraphrase

great minds of our time, or heroes of bygone days -

pass off their inspired sayings as yours, and sit back

and smile as your friends masturbate your thieving ego:

‘brother, that’s deep, your mind is amazing’

‘sister, you go girl, keep telling us, we are learning.’

‘like’, ‘like’, ‘like’, One hundred friends like this, or that,

and your head swells, and swells, and swells.

 

Facebook is Borg. 

Checkmate! You have been assimilated.

 

©2010 Nnorom Azuonye