Flowers for life, flowers for death
Flowers for life, to be discarded and forgotten,
flowers for death, to be emblazoned forever.
Death has a way of lionizing a man,
making his deeds all the more herculean,
his words more profound,
his stature ever greater,
his face forever youthful,
while I, Ephialtes, shall live on,
a loathsome thing,
remembered only when you see fit
to curse my name
and recount my misdeeds,
to speak of the ruin I have wrought,
my life reduced
to the sum of my failures.
Distance, too, has a way of tricking the senses,
features obscured, flaws unapparent.
Words carry in the empty air,
punctuated by long pauses,
your mind filling in the blanks
with whatever it desires,
while I have no such recourse,
my struggles mundane,
my words plain and common,
my imperfections exposed
under the microscope.
When I die,
see to it there are no flowers for me,
no shrines carved in stone,
no tributes etched on skin.
Let me be forgotten,
as I was in life,
a nondescript valley between
the mountainous shadows of other men,
lost among their artful words and
handsome features and other
uncommon things,
dandelions trampled underfoot
with nary a single thought.