No man is a hero...

Write a page long poem using this "No man is a hero to his valet."

In the quiet hour before the morning light,

When shadows stretch across the marble floor,

The world prepares to see the champion’s might,

But I am he who guards the dressing door.

The public sees the medals on the chest,

The steady hand, the gaze that never yields,

The orator in velvet finery dressed,

The conqueror of distant, bloody fields.

But here, amidst the scent of starch and tea,

The mythic stature shrinks to common bone.

There is no grandeur in a trembling knee,

No thunder in a stifled, weary groan.

I see the silver creeping through the hair,

The corset tightened on a heavy frame,

The practiced mask of courage and of care

Put on like silk to hide the sudden shame.

The boots I polish carry heavy feet

That stumble when the heavy drapes are drawn;

The voice that makes a thousand hearts retreat

Is thin and raspy in the gray of dawn.

He fumbles with a button, curses low,

And frets about a wrinkle in his sleeve;

The secrets that the cheering throngs forgo

Are precisely what I never can un-leave.

To them, he is a titan carved in stone,

A pillar of the state, a god of war;

To me, he is a man who fears the known,

And wonders what the struggle was all for.

He spills his wine and forgets where he has placed

The very keys that lock the city gates;

A monument of pride, so soon defaced

By all the tiny flaws that time dictates.

For greatness needs a distance to survive,

A pedestal to lift it from the clay;

It cannot breathe or hope to stay alive

When seen in such a naked, honest way.

No man is a hero to the one who waits,

Who folds the discarded linen of his pride;

Beyond the cheering crowds and iron gates,

I am the mirror where he cannot hide.

 

And Away We Go!https://t.co/rjiJBAdaMM

— AJ (@Rooofer) January 5, 2026