A Face Rewritten in Marble Air

He was shaped into a story others could wear like a mask

a living contradiction polished for an emperor’s crown

history tries to decide what remains of a stolen name

but even stone forgets the certainty of the body

and empire speaks in the grammar of Rome

where truth is often buried beneath disciplined silence

The court remembers him only as performance, as mask

a figure placed carefully beneath the weight of crown

as if identity could be reduced to a rewritten name

as if breath itself did not argue for the body

but palaces are built to echo only what Rome

permits to survive inside its ordered silence

Yet even erased lives leave fractures in silence

where something human refuses to become a mask

and echoes wander the corridors of Rome

searching for the outline behind the crown

for the truth that outlived the assigned name

and persisted stubbornly inside the living body

No decree can fully unmake a body

though it may try to refine it into silence

to strip the syllables away from a stolen name

to replace the face with something like a mask

to offer transformation as imperial crown

while history records only what pleases Rome

But what survives refusal is not owned by Rome

it gathers in memory, in fractured body

it resists the finality of every imposed crown

it speaks in the spaces between enforced silence

where even absence becomes a kind of mask

hiding what was never truly erased from name

And so the words return, refusing to end in name

they circle like ghosts through the idea of Rome

until empire itself feels like a borrowed mask

and what remains is neither crown nor broken body

but something that persists beyond prescribed silence

something uncontained by crown, Rome, or name, or mask, or body, or silence