Rats In Cages, Edit #2

[RiverNotch]

--Edit #2--
There are rats in cages and mazes that are happier than I am.
They do not kick walls or see constellations.
They do not think of life and death
Or balance them on dark and light fulcrums. Too many empty words. Easily,

There are rats in cages and mazes happier than I,
not kicking walls, not seeing constellations,
not thinking of life and death
and trying to balance them.... 

"dark and light" feels like an image that doesn't belong here, too, and "fulcrums" is way too technical for this poem's diction.

I watch them, fur and flesh over bone and brain.
I give them levers to pull, to see if they decide. This line is fair enough, although the space between it and the next feels superfluous -- the line before this, though, pulls the focus onto the speaker, in a way that is never really developed or enhanced.

The levers move in silence.

Their futile bodies know the question;
Their noble beings have no answer.
Their lives are only chemical computers,
Chaotic twitches of mortal muscle,
Seeking validation for every bite. I like these three lines -- very, er, noble. But the comma between "muscle" and "Seeking" is completely unnecessary.
They shake in self-awareness at the power of their hands. To me, there's no progression leading to this line: the rats start as rats, deciding blindly and sensually as rats do, and then, in a moment's passage, this vivid but disconnected anthropomorphizing. "Their lives are only chemical computers" -- as if this sense of self-awareness was merely chemicals computing (or at least the speaker has not offered an intelligent enough argument to convince me so). You might say (you have said) that the rats are merely symbolic of something, but for symbols like that to hold, they either have to be complete (that is, aside from any other stated modifiers, the rats have to be rats through and through -- nothing so silly as this wholly ideal sort of self-awareness) or their incompleteness has to be somehow directly (that is clearly and in-poem) acknowledged, which is of course never done here.

In reflection they see their fur
Placed over skin that is not their own
Just before the glass breaks. And so, everything falls apart. This could have been a neat statement on a sense of a spiritual falling apart, as I suspect you meant to say, but with the sudden break with reality on the paragraph-developing line, this poem suddenly turned into empty and disconnected navel-gazing, at least for me (and reading through some other comments here....). Ah well.