Reality as Hostage

Reality hangs like a flickering VACANCY sign
outside a condemned motel of abandoned facts,
its neon pulse stuttering through fog thick as burned paper.
Room by room, the structure gives way—
not from weather, but from the termites of distortion,
gnawing unseen beneath fresh coats of certainty.

Across countless screens and channels,
unreviewed words leave the dock without ballast,
unproofed claims launched like glittering fishhooks into the dark,
each demanding belief before examination.

Truth arrives wearing a forged passport,
misrepresentation dressed in immaculate tailoring,
the counterfeit stamped authentic with a conspiratorial wink.

Meanwhile…

Reality sits bound in the basement, hostage,
hearing its own voice expertly imitated upstairs.

Discernment, once a whetstone for the mind,
a compass trembling toward true north,
has become contested territory.

Some uses of A.I. do not illuminate the cave—
they decorate the cave wall and call it daylight.
Answers arrive before questions can mature.
Doubt is anesthetized by convenience.

We consume conclusions as fast food,
swallow certainty in prepackaged capsules,
and mistake velocity for wisdom.

Books become fossils.
Paragraphs become obstacles.
Attention scatters like startled birds from a gunshot.
Reading becomes skimming,
learning becomes harvesting,
understanding becomes optional.

Are we becoming a post-literate people,
trading the long pilgrimage of thought
for algorithmic shortcuts through the wilderness of uncertainty?

Still…

Beneath the roar of manufactured confidence,
two realities stand untouched by revision.
We are born—blood-first, astonished, undeniable.
We die—finite, mortal, undeniable.
No editor can rewrite those sentences.
No machine can airbrush their blunt grammar.
Birth enters the room like thunder in the veins;
death closes the ledger with granite certainty.

These are the mountains that rise above every digital weather pattern.
Yet I cannot help wondering:
if enough falsehood circulates through the arteries of a culture,
if deception becomes our daily bread and secondhand air,
if we drink counterfeit certainty until it poisons judgment itself,
can we hasten our own ending?

Can a civilization inhale so much fiction
that it arrives sooner at death's threshold—
still clutching a map of the world that never existed,
having forgotten the difference between what was real
and what merely glowed in the dark?