In classrooms shaped by the relentless cadence of the bell, the journey from obedience to imagination is fraught with invisible boundaries. This poem probes how surveillance and discipline can quietly overshadow the promise of learning and selfhood. Through the metaphor of the bell, it mourns what is lost—and what might still be reclaimed—in the name of democracy and education. (A Requiem for Democracy) First hour— Bright with the promise of rupture, She steps into an architecture of potential: New campus, unknown maps, A chorus of names she has yet to taste. The world—raw material— awaits her as text, as provocation, its slate unmarked, her heart scaffolding hope to unlearn certainties and make of knowledge a restless tool— to create, to critique, to loosen the weird logics that anchored her world thus far. School had been a panopticon: Commandments circled the air— "Don’t do this. Don’t do that." Every vector a surveillance, her girlhood doubly patrolled; thoughts parenthes...