What begins as simple flowing joy,
the child’s delight in learning’s
first sweet taste,
becomes curriculum,
becomes measurement,
becomes the door that gates this satisfaction.

The body knows its desires,
and the mind knows its thoughts,
its wonders,
but the classroom says sit still,
wait your turn,
raise your hand to speak your mind’s
wanderings,
and so, they learn to portion out
wonder into packets,
to schedule curiosity between the bells that
segment day from day,
throughout years,
across lives.

While screens ping with endless rivers where
natural thirst can drink,
here drinking becomes drowning,
scrolling becomes seeking unfulfilled,
becomes the same repetitive motion towards
what was never lost,
packaged, renamed,
for consumption,
to fill the unnamed spaces
not at rainbow’s edge.

Pleasure unrestrained used to breath before it
learned to wear a uniform,
rerouted
to clock in and clock out,
to convert every satisfaction into
data points and metrics.

There is the child precarious:
between the joy that rises naturally like breath
and the breathlessness of chasing joy’s
synthetic shadow through the marketplace
of managed needs.

 

21/9/2025