I loved them once, the silver screen, the stories carried, vast and clean.
A hero’s stand, a lover’s vow—
where has that moral compass gone now?
The cigarette, a glamorous lure, the casual fix, the “harmless” cure.
The blade drawn cool without a cost, a message whispered: nothing’s lost.
Immorality dressed in wit and grace, a smirk upon a beautiful face, the conduct praised I can’t defend— the scene where virtue meets its end.
So I forsook the American dark, its needle’s gleam, its bloody arc, its heroes puffing clouds of gray as if such habits pave the way.
I fled the British drawing-room, where irony gives vice its bloom, where infidelity wears a gown of wit, and consequence will never sit.
I thought, There must be cleaner light, a screen that still knows wrong from right.
I searched through Seoul’s kinetic frame, where vengeance is a stylish game.
The hallways red with arterial spray, a choreographed and brutal ballet.
At first it seemed to understand the weight of blood upon a hand.
But soon the blood became the point, a slick addiction to disjoint a soul from what the soul should feel— the violence plastic, never real.
I turned to Mumbai’s vibrant glow, hoping the music wouldn’t show the substance clouding younger eyes, the glorified and smoky highs.
But in the dance, behind the song, the casual use was just as strong. A line of powder, poised and cool, became the new and golden rule.
The sacred world of song and pain now peddled vice for financial gain.
I sought the Scandinavian cold, where stories serious and old examined life with honest dread, not glamorizing what they said.
But even there the needle glints, the intimate and graphic hints that what was once a warning cry is now an invitation sly.
They trade on shock, they coast on shame, and call the ugly by a beautiful name.
What happened to the screen I knew? What poisoned all I thought was true?
Was it the little glowing glass that normalized the things that pass for edgy now, for bold and free, this tolerance of what shouldn’t be?
Was it the fear of drawing lines, of saying “this degrades, confines”?
A phantom story, loud and thin, a drug, a smoke, a casual sin, paraded out as something brave, digging what’s precious an early grave. But I am here. I will not sway. I won’t applaud the cheap display.
I know the stories that can lift, that treat the soul not as a drift of smoke upon a vacant air, but as a thing beyond compare. I’ll wait out this corrupted frost.
No true moral compass is ever lost.
A cleaner frame will find its start, and I will know it with my uncorrupted heart.
Originally posted on Inktella; a feedback-driven poetry platform.
