Disenthralled Souls

One Formula for Perfect Character Development
By Ross Stager

I. What You Call Yourself
In the majority of situations
you are likely to refer
to yourself as your God-given
name, the one your parents designated.

But this no longer cages the rabid
Individual intimately infected
By that all-too-apparent
And obvious necessity
To remain distinct.

When we try to reach
For intellectual maturity
We are likely to develop
Our own ambitions
In light of what we have seen.

II. In Light of What We Have Seen
Economics is our total interaction
With the state of commerce
And exchange on its many levels,
It’s all of commerce and exchange
Themselves uniformly.

Into my regularly scheduled grind,
Programming, agenda, my work,
Studies, and change of experience,
The same mirror of cultural complexity
I open my eyes to every morning.

The text-speech I read from the page-lips
And colorful mouths fuels these discussions
Like a book-community, each volume of reflection
Some nugget of wisdom passed down
In all the dusty manuscripts of old.

III. In All the Dusty Manuscripts of Old
It’s a cold emotionless shadow
Being an extra in life’s eternal fiction
One out of the social cast
But you can still yearn for wisdom,
Because despair and sorrow are choices.

The twin concepts of politics and anthropology
Duke it out in the arena of Love’s Fate.
Art sits grinning as a bookie
Trying to defy destiny, a seemingly shallow
Bastard whose depths confirms impotence.

The state of the Ego is in tattered shreds,
But articulating its significance can never be
Exhausted, the awful quasi-solipsist needs
To stop pretending they understand a virtuous
Morality and forge peace with communitarianism.

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Ross Stager is a Philosophy major at the University of Minnesota and he blogs some of his creative writing projects at his website RossStagerCreations.com, including other character development pieces like “First-Order Certainties” about the five tradition senses and a poetic-prose memoir. He is accessible on Twitter with the handle @RossStager and works as a produce clerk at a grocery store in the Southwest suburbs of Minneapolis.

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