A Mind’s Captivity

Screens glow like obedient moons,
hovering just above the nightstand,
a constellation of curated noise
dripping soft blue syrup into the room.
Each pixel a tiny salesman,
hawking shortcuts to thought,
whispering Don’t think too hard… we’ve already done it for you.

Across the ceiling,
my wandering imagination,once a bright red comet,
now crawls like a stunned beetle, legs confused

by the sugar-slick gravity of endless headlines looping themselves
like carnival rides no one should stay on too long.

My pencil lies beside me,
a thin wooden relic,
a buried antenna waiting to tune into an older, quieter frequency.
It watches as the screen’s glow pours itself into my pupils
like a slow anesthetic.

The spider in the corner
descends on its silver thread
the way a thought used to,
unexpected, precise, deliberate.
It pauses midair,
unimpressed by the algorithmic haze filling the room like stale theater fog.

How easily media embalms a restless mind,
wrapping it in soft gauze of recycled opinions,
mass-produced outrage,
and the warm hum of someone else’s conclusions.

It is a gentle lobotomy, administered in high definition.

Beneath this quiet suffocation,
the parrot of imitation shrieks,
its feathers neon with borrowed phrases,
its beak sharpened on commentary it never questioned.
It squawks until even my doubts sound secondhand.

But then…

A rebellious breeze sneaks through the cracked window,
ruffling the curtains like a stage cue.
The spider sways, pendulum-like, measuring the air’s sudden clarity.

And the pencil,that humble wooden insurgent,
leans toward my hand as if recognizing the moment
when silence finally punctures the static.

Tonight, perhaps,
I’ll switch off the moons,
let the comet wake,
and carve from the dark a thought unchained.