The tour group meandered
through silent monuments
of marble, limestone, and granite,
both grandiloquent and pedestrian,
both a signal of worldly prominence
and all those left behind could
scrape together on short notice.

They stopped by the grave of
a once-famed ragtime composer,
the still resting place of a musician
who had been all
banging syncopation and boisterous clamor.

The lyrics of his most famous song
were etched onto the memorial
lovingly in reverent tribute
with the presumption of indelible finality.

But the words were so blurred,
so bled with the rot and rust of weather and neglect
you could no longer make them out.
Perhaps it was a simple failure to scrub
the accursed headstone clean.
Perhaps it was the inexorable stain of time
that could never truly be lifted.

In the end, it was all the same,
all the same,
the same freighted symbolism
all the same.