\n<\/p>\n
I loved them once, the silver screen, the stories carried, vast and clean.<\/p>\n
A hero’s stand, a lover’s vow\u2014<\/p>\n
where has that moral compass gone now?<\/p>\n
The cigarette, a glamorous lure, the casual fix, the “harmless” cure.<\/p>\n
The blade drawn cool without a cost, a message whispered: nothing’s lost.<\/p>\n
Immorality dressed in wit and grace, a smirk upon a beautiful face, the conduct praised I can’t defend\u2014 the scene where virtue meets its end.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
I fled the British drawing-room, where irony gives vice its bloom, where infidelity wears a gown of wit, and consequence will never sit.<\/p>\n
I thought, There must be cleaner light, a screen that still knows wrong from right.<\/p>\n
I searched through Seoul’s kinetic frame, where vengeance is a stylish game.<\/p>\n
The hallways red with arterial spray, a choreographed and brutal ballet.<\/p>\n
At first it seemed to understand the weight of blood upon a hand.<\/p>\n
But soon the blood became the point, a slick addiction to disjoint a soul from what the soul should feel\u2014 the violence plastic, never real.\u00a0<\/p>\n
I turned to Mumbai’s vibrant glow, hoping the music wouldn’t show the substance clouding younger eyes, the glorified and smoky highs.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
The sacred world of song and pain now peddled vice for financial gain.<\/p>\n
I sought the Scandinavian cold, where stories serious and old examined life with honest dread, not glamorizing what they said.<\/p>\n
But even there the needle glints, the intimate and graphic hints that what was once a warning cry is now an invitation sly.<\/p>\n
They trade on shock, they coast on shame, and call the ugly by a beautiful name.<\/p>\n
What happened to the screen I knew? What poisoned all I thought was true?<\/p>\n
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?<\/p>\n
Was it the fear of drawing lines, of saying “this degrades, confines”?<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
No true moral compass is ever lost.<\/p>\n
A cleaner frame will find its start, and I will know it with my uncorrupted heart.<\/p>\n
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