Author: Michael Aaron Casares

Black Orpheus: Purple Haze

/ Michael Aaron Casares / Leave a comment

A black light
of solutions mounted
above me and below. The drums 
are plummeting with me and into me. 
She rides, she screams. She has no place 
here but resides and remains. She is a 
fixture, a shadow, a pillar. A fraction
of a promise lost and kept. No fluid
in exchange remembers. Not even
molecularly. Not even in reticence
the passive memory of Akashic hymns
promise the fine print to the contract is
more than a footnote. The celestial bells
clamor cacophonous to harmonic, wake
the shaman, and collapse the breath, the
burning kindle at the base of the throat.
The sudden rush of blackness and lust. 

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“Black Orpheus: Purple Haze” is written by Michael Aaron Casares. All rights reserved.

Black Orpheus, What Is –

/ Michael Aaron Casares / Leave a comment

The Black Orpheus poetry series is available to read on Wattpad and on The Root of Many Returns blog. In the now ten-part poetry collection, I am presenting poems in the voice of Nicholas Duke, the protagonist of The Distance to the End. So, in effect, it is his poetry readers are engaging.

Black Orpheus: Poems of Dreams and Dementia is a work-in-progress style publication I am sharing with readers as I create each poem for the collection. Once the collection is complete, I may publish it. I may include in the next Nicholas Duke novel due out later this year. Whether a chapbook publication, or a full length collection, I’m not sure. My next full length collection of poetry, Even in Death, will be out later this year as well. Now, as per what Black Orpheus is about? The easiest answer: addiction. Addiction to life. Addiction to death. Addiction to personalities, alcohol, situation, drugs, and ascension. It is about the will to overcome, and its brought to you by Nicholas Duke by way of my ghost hand. If you have a WattPad account, please follow, like and share Black Orpheus. I have a new story coming soon on Wattpad, this one also a work-in-progress. The story is called “Sex Demons.” While I’m not aboslutely sure the direction this story is

going to take, I will be sure to notify readers when it is available. “Sex Demons” will be exclusive to Wattpad, unlike Black Orpheus, which I have shared simultaneously at WattPad and, here, at The Root of Many Returns.

The Evolution of a Series, the Pathology of a Writer

The Distance to the End was published in 2016 and slated as the first in a series of six novels that follow writer at large, Nicholas Duke. While the crux of the series is yet to be revealed, some clues are dropped in the novel. To throw another dimension into the mix, I’ve elected to create a manuscript of Nick’s poetry, a sort-of framed collection within the Nicholas Duke lit-verse. While Black Orpheus: Poems of Dreams and Dementia is in idea a book of symbolic and sometimes metaphysical poetry, it is also about addiction and uses the shadows of dreams to cover for its precious lost dignity. A simple dissection of the verse may or may not parlay those Easter eggs to wanton students of literature, but may to even the slightly initiated. The next two Nicholas Duke books are in the works, though not simultaneously. Where The Distance to the End saw Nicholas rousing rabbles

in the suave streets of the Las Vegas of the new millennium, one of the new volumes will find Nick Duke down south in Texas and Mexico proper. The Nicholas Duke novels are about a new millennium poet and writer finding his voice amid a cast of bad influences, sordid mentors, compromising situations, and clandestine rendezvous–all naturally or chemically elevated to the pleasure of the reader. Of course.

What are the Sex Demons?

The “Sex Demons” is a planned work-in-progress to debut on WattPad later this winter. While readers will need a WattPad account to be notified when a new chapter is released, “Sex Demons” will only be available on Wattpad. I haven’t decided the length of the story, but will be wrapping that up as I conclude brainstorming. In the same vein of the Max Caulfield Serials, “Sex Demons” is erotic LGBT speculative fiction. Max Caulfield is not the protagonist of the story. Go to Wattpad, get an account and subscribe to my page to get up to the second notifications about “Sex Demons” and when new parts of “Black Orpheus: Poems of Dreams and Dementia” are available.

Cover art to Black Orpheus: Poems of Dreams and Dementia

Black Orpheus: Black Choke

/ Michael Aaron Casares / Leave a comment

Unable to breathe.
The wisdom of forefathers
repetitive in the mind,
break. repeat. break. 
repeat. There were 
no bread crumbs laid 
to find the way home,
this as a fact lends comfort
to the reasoning for acceptance.
Because the way home cannot be
remembered it will be ruled as a 
consequence non-existent.
It is a newborn forgetting 
the previous life it fought for.
The spirit interrupted in the prime
of its existence suffocates. 
It cannot breathe.
It is a hand clasped over
mouth and nostrils;
it is a forearm to the throat.
It is lost in the blackness of its own
void. It is uncertain and scared.
It acts out. It is unbalanced 
and extreme, its natural 
patterns punctuated. 
Pinned to the wall for
all to see, the point was
deep and nettled between
recognition and acknowledgment.
The ghost of denial resided. 
Sacrificing freedom for ascension 
like black on black netherlands
overripe with sewage and swamp
wishes it was nothing if not an
inconvenient stench, like burnt
bodies beneath gray skies,
raining like snowflakes 
on rigid ice rivers and solid
ice lakes. It wishes to will
itself into non-existence,
not understanding the 
suicide of the soul. 
Nevertheless, it has pledged
to honor all its exits, to recognize
the gift given remedied at times by
choices and the streams followed 
throughout the venture taken
to remain constant in the conscious mind
that created and rebuked all missions
and report. This world wind of
transformation, this dervish of 
Pandora, the blackened light outlined
in gold, replace the dominance of winter
in the soul. It seeks only to breathe 
easy once again, to remove the 
standing wall around its palace,
to unsheathe its stagnation 
and source energy to 
every artifact that
every needed to 
live. 

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“Black Orpheus: Black Choke” is written by Michael Aaron Casares. All rights reserved.