It Could Have Been You

Hellenistic, you put your best foot on the polished wood floor. Beauty so broken out boards break. The smoothness comes from the legion of slaves before you bowing and braced with their full boned denials and soft tears. But you don't think of these things caught as you are in your mirrors. How they hold you harmless and return your loving gaze oblivious of anyone else. How could it be any different?
When last night there were these tears for how far you had yet to go and how you weren't going to make it onto the pillar barge, tonight there is only a living glow; you couldn't make the team heading out for the slaughter but you could set yourself up very nicely with flames and ladders of your own device.
I'll show them all you said to no one.
When it's quiet you always make the best vows.
And softly underfoot the polished glow regarded your after image with something very much like love, though if you had been watching you wouldn't have called it that. The walls, too, warmed to your passage in ways they hadn't to the thousands before. The air thickened with the moment as the murmurs trailed with rumors and admiration. No one could burn like you. No one else made such fine aroma of their flames like you. No one like you.
It was said in whispers and nuance as airy as the two toned breeze miles from here by horses and reeds in unison that your passage could not have been without that slight that so consumed you on that night. How that night had to have you pushed so far beyond by all the skinny knees and elbows of boys fighting to prove they belonged on that barge. How you had to be shoved down with your tear streaked faith broken. How you had to be stripped of everything you thought you were by that brash and heartless bang clanging their own pans louder than you thought they could. Your gentle art had to be torn from your hands and trampled and it was right that not one of them even looked at who you are, blinded as they were by their own boister and choler, their own jangle and wrestle, their own holler and wasted.
Their destiny was to perish in a loud and prideful effort for someone else and their crooked proxy of imagination. If you had made it then you would have lashed out in agony when the fire swept through, you would have called with the chorus to the gods who were too busy blasting each other with rockets and flares. You would have charred with no aroma but flesh in the sea of flesh and riot, colors of smoke and coal, colors of turned over earth.