She Stands Alone She stands alone,   a single bulb lighting   an entire room,   the walls curved   into her private sphere.     No doors.   No windows.   No-one can break in.   Her world is the only world   and all things lie within her scope,   sealed within her soul.     Solitary appetites   she pursues   in consecrated isolation,   in this her sacristy,   her prison, her cell —   an inside   with no conceivable outside.

Private Language In / creasing thought, the self   doubles / folds  inwards,  suppose a private language  against the world’s shared grammar —   self-authored, a book   written for no .  one.    A page     torn away, stains     in the margins, a footnote    wrongly numbered, the letter ‘i’    faintly printed.      Such is the pain of the man  who yearns  for his whole self   between the covers of biography   and meets only   estrangement.

On the Point of Vanishing     Cogito ergo ends with a sum   beyond my reckoning:     Thoughts add up   and multiply   exponentially like...

In the Dark, Dreaming (Inspired, in part, by John Milton’s Paradise Lost, Book 5: 108-113) Tonight I am not in my right mind. It was...

There is (if you care to know), a flower of folly growing On my brain, on the surface of the matter’s deep. Fit for the Fire, its fate is...

In my mind a series of irrational numbers, of non-repeatable fractions without end. Something doesn’t add up. I am divided,...

Descartes' Dream I was a lonely cripple Seeking shelter; I heard thunder, saw fire. Sleeping too much, Snow on the rise. My bones warm...

By Richard Mather Dreams like girls in private rooms beckon from windows the souls of sleepers who move shadelike through night’s dark...

Seeing this house, that tree, the sky – my experience is already in accord with certain classes of thought*. World anterior to thought...

Environed by varying degrees of space,   (depending on where you draw the line),   a poem is a picture of the artist's mind on a pagewhite canvas.

Part 1: Being and heaviness People who suffer from depression often complain of a feeling of heaviness ; not just in the emotional or mental sense, but as something physical   — a visceral sensation pressing on the chest or wrapping itself around the body and the legs. Some sufferers say it is like having lead weights on their legs. Among the DSM-IV criteria for atypical depression is: “Leaden paralysis (i.e. heavy, leaden feelings in arms or legs).” § René Descartes proposes