Sad Height*

by Michael Aaron Casares

Wind sweeps over the sullen
city as rats rampant, reside
in the streets and cracked buildings.
The wind pushes passed our dwellings,
mere boxes painted and carved to taste–
our foundations feed fleas and termites!
Our home the food and fodder of a meeker
being. Roaches, scared, they scamper,
carrying the memory of the world inside
their mind. Roaches, wise men of old
cry out, “Waste no compassion on these
separate dead!”
Separate in a unity that binds
us in stagnate desperation, a notion
bound, a truth be told:
it is in our boxes we learn,
in being bound, we are separate
to each other. It is in these hidden
truths the subtle lies have disguised
the idea of the individual. We are a
homogenous routine that ticks
like a clock. Our life an open
book upon a screen, predictable
and designed to be shelved away
with the other thoughts that would
otherwise dissolve the illusions
we defend as our reality.
“Waste no compassion,” he says,
“waste nothing on these separate dead
for they are lost among the fallen
as the wind passes them by,
and they are fast asleep as
the wind leaves them behind.”


*from "The Terrorist" Virgogray Press, 2009

The Choice of all Man

by Michael Aaron Casares

That all men are created equal,
that all men are the same—all are one
and so an expression of the same.
That all are experiencing life with similarity:
unaware, unawake, unknowing the true origins
of what we have been born into. That we are
all born into the same situation without control
and live life with the same motivation, to live and
learn and with that experience to learn and grow.
I did not know this. I had to learn this, to use this
in day-to-day dealings with my friends and neighbors.
This empathic mentality, calling it like it is, receiving
what the other emotes and assimilating. I was blind
for the most part. I was secure and well fed. I was
cared for. My sweet rewards, my years of freedom
to grow and cultivate my stakes in this network of
living energy, this net all the same, pulsing, vibrating,
gyrating, the pockets swell to withering heights, sad
heights that juxtapose the reason to survive.
This cyclical vocation from birth to adulthood and
into death, but given a chance to learn before the
strings that tie us to this plane release their locks
to solid ground and let us drift into a space, a home
a place where the soul has chosen to wait and has
chosen to be found.