On Being Told We Should Have Learned

They say it softly now.
As if death were curriculum.
As if a body were a lesson plan
meant to correct posture, tone, compliance.

Haven’t you learned they ask,
standing where authority once meant pause,
where power knew the weight
of not being casual with consequence.

Nothing in the sentence breaks a sweat.
That is how you know it is dangerous.

The words arrive practiced,
pressed flat,
like a hand resting near a holster
that never needs to move to be understood.

Memory is repurposed.
Grief is conscripted.
A recent name becomes a warning label
applied to the living.

We were taught decency was foundational.
Not aspirational.
Something you guarded precisely because
it disappeared quietly, not all at once.

Now it thins in daylight,
thread by thread,
until intimidation learns a gentler voice
and calls itself instruction.

This is how it happens.
Not with commands.
With implication.

Not with fury.
With precedent.

Not with chaos.
With a sentence delivered evenly,
as though history itself
had already rendered judgment.

One day we wake up fluent
in what we once refused to speak,
asking when the line moved,
asking why no one shouted.

No one needed to.

The line moved quietly.
History will name it later.