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Lessons That I've Learned

Part 1: The Caged Bird Knows Not What is Beyond the Cage
There's a boy who lives
on a street lined with flaming maples
and nowhere else.
The gnarled wood cage
turns his vision into a tunnel --
something just beyond,
but it's hard to tell just what
when you're 9 and trapped in a box.
Some people on Easton Avenue
don't even know that the perfect sky
keeps secrets from them,
blankets more that just their
perfect little world.
There is a boy who lives
in books and photographs
and everywhere else.
To his curious eyes, the world is unsheathed,
but harshly ontouchable from Easton Avenue.
The upper-middle class houses harbor
skylights that gaze to a perfect sky,
but don't actually see it.
their views are stagnant and old, like those of their owners, who
laugh at the boy for glancing
at a larger heaven that isn't perfect.
A sky with tears, tattered and torn,
leaving white patches that
replay the soul of a boy
on a phonograph
where wide scratches stutter.
There's a boy who doesn't live,
because on Easton Avenue, living
is simply being.
And there's a boy in a gray house
with yellow doors on Easton Avenue
who soars off the runway
out of his window every night,
mapping a sky filled with dreams and truth
that one day shall take him from
a scornful strongbox
filled with empty people
who lost their sight long ago.
-------copyright Timothy R. Cassese
(comment on my Lj if you want to read the other 3 parts)

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