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.

A Ghost As If I am not your keeper O ghost who crouches At the grave of my father. The body is dead; it is in the shade. A pale figure with a sheet for a robe rises from the earth (His hair black as ravens' feet). With cold-clay fingers, He could quell the soul’s fire. As if. A seagull cries In the salted air Like a baby Calling for its parents. There is blood on the land, Blood in the rivers too. You are not what you appear To thi

On the Point of Vanishing Cogito ergo ends with a sum beyond my reckoning: Thoughts add up and multiply exponentially like numbers. I must have miscalculated. It’s what happens when you cannot count on your own mind to make sense of the world. This time I’ll square the root - 100,000 to 316 to 18 to 4 to 2 to 1.4 to 1.2 to 1.1 to 1 - and keep on subtracting 1 to 0.5 to 0.1 … I arrive at a bare fraction of a thought, a mere variable

Thought Putting aside the extensive facthood of properties and things distributed in space, one has to wonder whether existence’s sense of itself -- the subjective correlative of the world at large -- is a prolonged sensation of horror, a horror that exceeds all the little horrors that we (as feeling individuals) experience over and again.

Irrational Numbers In my mind a series of irrational numbers, of non-repeatable fractions without end. Something doesn’t add up. I am divided, incommensurable. I count on my intellect to calculate a solution but thoughts multiply endlessly and without purpose - an innumerable and undetermined infinity indifferent to sense. All this thinking-without-limits is a problem I cannot get my head around.

Thinking I Am Seeing myself — the experience already falls in line with the categories of thought that precede it: unity, and I‑ness. And so I am unfree to see myself as I am. For if experience is bound by forms, then whoever thinks he is free to see himself truly moves within those same constraints. And so? The solution: Drop the agenda. Neither self nor freedom can be sought as objects. The ‘I’ that thinks it is free, that asks these que

A Jazz Trombone Extends a Metaphor, the Length of a Memory A jazz trombone extends a metaphor, the length of a memory. With a memory, my grandfather says, You got to hear its pitch, its tone & blow life into it, then you retract, Slide right on back to Winter ‘69 When the Big Band scene died or the 1956 Klan attack on Nat King Cole; More often it’s1930s Long Island NYC Where his father met his mother (my great-grandmother) & you’re right there on a corner in Bro