Our primitive wish for immortality
Storied Odysseus saw Achilles
As ruler in the Empire of Shades
But the Phthian hero
Scoffing rejected the compliment
Of him who blinded the Cyclops

He’d rather break down corrugated he said
On the loading dock at Walmart
Punch a clock
Than lord it over these ineffectual wisps
Ontologically extant but discontent
Unwilling to slough off the habits of a prince
When he had long since gained the guerdon he craved
Achiever of deathless glory

Great Alexander knew that hunger
To sow the observance of his name by force
Fame an insistent showtune
An earworm in the form of a sword
Place his name on the library
I will force you to remember
Julius Caesar in a pinned-up sheet
Taking his cuts at the middle school
Napoleon posing in the insane asylum

A thing of beauty is a joy forever
And who wouldn’t love to append one’s name
To have it stuck on there by force of law

A bunch of stupid nominalists
That if the name persists post res
The one who once bore it never dies

Recognition acknowledgement remembrance knowledge
Nobody knows very much at all
Beethoven jutting his lower lip and curly-haired
Laboring under disabilities physical and psychological
Is dead
And what does anybody know of him
Who will explain the deathless replicable Ninth

Fame come here to me young lady
What have you to say for yourself
Having contaminated my mind with the error
That the people I know are nobody
The precious beautiful fragmentary ones are nobody
That if nobody knows me
I’m nobody