An Alphabet for Burning the Lie

An Alphabet for Burning the Lie

As ash drifts from burned norms and scorched precedents, America inhales the powder of its own amnesia and calls it strength.

Beneath banners stitched with grievance and gold, the crowd learns to chant before it learns to think, and the echo becomes a creed.

Courts bend like reeds in a manufactured storm, their roots gnawed by appointments that mistake loyalty for law.

Down Main Street, the drums of order thunder a simple rhythm—comply, comply—until complexity is trampled into mud.

Every eagle is conscripted, its wide wingspan reduced to a logo, its wild eye trained to look away.

Fear is franchised at the border of the mind, sold as safety, wrapped in slogans that cut like glass.

Gagged teachers mouth histories they are forbidden to teach, while the blackboard remembers what the mouth cannot say.

Hymns to the flag drown out the hunger of the many, sanctifying power while empty plates glow like unanswered prayers.

In the ink of executive pens, dissent grows faint, as if the paper itself has learned to flinch.

Jails rise where libraries once breathed, and the air smells of silence shelved and padlocked.

Kettles of rage simmer on screens all night, stirred by a man who mistakes volume for truth and appetite for destiny.

Law is recast as a mirror that flatters authority, reflecting back a face it already loves.

Marches rehearse forgetting with smiling masks, while history is dragged behind the parade, scuffed and uncredited.

Neighbors are sorted into columns and codes, their names filed thin until they pass like paper through the hands of power.

Oaths are edited for convenience, mercy struck through with a red pen that bleeds.

Police prayers clatter like coins in a cup, alms for absolution after the baton falls.

Questions are quarantined as contagion, curiosity sealed behind plastic words and warning labels.

Rights molt into privileges on a seasonal schedule, granted and revoked by weather patterns called polls.

Screens sermonize obedience in high definition, baptizing cruelty with charisma and calling it leadership.

Trump stands at the lectern of grievance, teaching the nation to mistake dominance for love and punishment for justice.

Under his shadow, uniforms learn a grammar of command that forgets the syntax of care.

Votes are vacuumed from the rooms where hope once argued, leaving a hush that sounds like consent.

Whispers take the long way home, carrying names and promises folded small against the cold.

Xenon-bright lies light the exits, herding the frightened toward narrower doors.

Yards fill with flags while faces thin out, belonging replaced by display.

Zero-sum dawns demand a different sun, and we answer with rage braided to love, refusing the night they sell as morning.

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This ABCDarian poem shared with DVerse Poets Pub, in full outrage.

©2026 Christopher Reilley 

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