SOCIAL POEM: " SCREEN SERMON" BY PUNSMITH AND DR ANYOKWU'S COMMENTARY

It’s seven-eleven!

Time to feed you

With concepts and shots,

With more pixels than Camon Eleven.

I’ll glow you nutrients

That’ll strongly weaken your mind,

Shaping it to dazzle your sight,

Until you marry a screen with no spine:

Just curves and clickbait grins.

Your soul, outsourced

To reels and recycled sins.

Scroll, oh disciple!

Each swipe is a prayer

To gods in glass temples

Who profit from your stare.

Your dreams, now in draft.

Your thoughts, auto-corrected.

You’re trending but lost;

Influenced, but unprotected.

The world: now a caption

Too short for nuance to thrive.

You’re alive for the content,

But is the content alive?

Eat. Post. Repeat.

You're the product,

And the receipt.

© ABDULMALIK YAHYA 

(The Punsmith)

02-06-2025

A COMMENTARY ON YAHYA' SCREEN SERMON

COMMENTATOR: CHRIS ANYOKWU, Ph.D

Yahya’s poem entitled "Screen Sermon" is yet another fascinating offering from his fecund stylus. This poem, it would seem, speaks to the raging global infatuation of so-called digital denizens, otherwise known as netizens with screen time.

Of late, the institution of the family is rapidly falling apart, pulverised by compulsive addiction to the phone. Couples and their kids drift apart, fixated for hours on end, even into the wee hours of the night—surfing, browsing, posting mostly lurid and salacious content. Divorce rates are mounting; antisocial children proliferate, and society teeters along the brink, risking a suicidal plunge into the abyss.

Under the present circumstances, absolutely nothing makes sense anymore. Not religious dogma or doctrine, not old-fashioned moral preachments or ethical codes—nothing. It’s now all expediency. There are no moral standards, just unregulated permissiveness. This burgeoning regime of libertarianism is exemplified by so-called online influencers and content creators: TikTok is their stomping ground, their favourite haunt.

School is deemed a scam; parental guidance, an encumbrance. Life as we know it is fast disappearing right before our eyes. Enter the meretricious tyranny of screen imagery, emojis, emoticons, and the Gen-Z mutilation of language—and the stability of meaning it embodies. It’s a postmodern condition of depthlessness, fantasy, indeterminacy, flux, simulation, and simulacra.

Like captives, like “disciples”—netizens live for salacious and titillating content. The Camon 11 Android phone is now a mobile gaol in which they are trapped, all in the pursuit of ersatz pleasure and tinsel bliss. The ensuing absence of “nuance” appositely clinches the regnant crisis of spirit.

In Marx’s Eleven Theses on Feuerbach, he writes: “Philosophers have succeeded in interpreting the world in various ways; the point, therefore, is to change it.” What we are witnessing is the cataclysmic praxis of change.

So, strap in, folks, bumpy ride ahead!

-Nigeria

© 02-06-2025