I came across this on a piece of paper left on a subway car bench on a Manhattan bound N-train I caught at Pacific Street on my way to Union Square. The title above was the title at the top of page one. I have used it here as the title of this entry for … Continue reading Pro Deo et Patria? [prose poem]

[Flash Fiction] I tell the story of a story told in writing of a story told in writing by someone who created a storyteller in the written text to tell the story of someone who becomes, in some minds, conflated with the storyteller; and the evidence of this is in the artifact found by a woman … Continue reading When 1 Person, 2 Persons, 3 Persons, More are Not Enough

"I still believe I am capable of murder. I know at least five or six bus drivers I would have already shot if I were crazy enough to think I could get away with it. I hesitate to say fat pig brutes reading at the seventh grade, but I want to think it," he says. What else … Continue reading Victim, Victimize, Victimizer [Flash Fiction]

Time: Evening Place: Rome [After an afternoon visit to the Sistine Chapel, at a caffe.]   He says what he says when he writes in his journal as he has written in one for how long now counting in the decades for sure. These are excerpts from his journal, his being whose? There is the he I … Continue reading The Sistine Chapel Tells, prose poem

Of course I believe in God. The universe is too absurd. Nature would create a universe that made more sense, he said to her, a woman he imagines listens to him as he listens to himself, talking to himself to others in himself at once. She pretends badly that she is listening to him. He … Continue reading Happy Marriage; or, Praise of Folly [prose poem]

  Pre-Prologue . . . and it was raining and raining and raining and there was nothing anyone could do about it or in it. Prologue It had begun to rain again. i The rain was coming down in sheets it seemed at one moment, in torrents the next, the gutters were awash, overflowing. When … Continue reading Rain Outside a Window in a Movie [A Short Story]

  falling leaf fallen leaves, late November morning- sun through the branches

Author's Prefeace There is a level of literacy coupled with a facility with the traditions of writing that allows a reader to do more than scrape the crumbs off a table as waiters do before the coffee and dessert. Do you have such acumen in  reading? I have argued a number of times that reading … Continue reading Memento Mori [Flash Fiction]

Infinite possibility is an avalanche waiting to bury me? Skimming pages is not reading. To read or not to read, now that is the question, whether it is nobler with the eyes to see the depth of the text, or with them, only look at the page, fooled by the superficiality of the paper, the … Continue reading Eight-hundred Words [A Short-short Story]

It looks like rain, it feels like rain, it is going to rain, I can tell. I am a sick man--no, not this. I am a hungry man--no, not this either. To fall or not to fall for her, for anyone, for anything, we are always falling for things, for others, someone somewhere, it is … Continue reading I Wait for the Rain [A Short Story]

Prefatory Remarks Everything in close-up. Totality is eclipsed? We imagine such a view. We think we know that this is the place, the location of . . . pornography is a grotesque metonymy. Metonymy is simply put, a part for the whole of the thing or the person, do you remember suit for business executive, sail for ship? Vagina for … Continue reading To Be Longing to Belong [fiction]

In memory alive or in memory dead. What is that I would like to know? I do not have to say it to you, that I know keeping him alive as I do day in and day out is far and above what marking the date on the calendar proves or disproves. This is a … Continue reading Remembrance is not a Day [Flash Fiction]

What good are my eyes if they only see what they are told to see? I have always seen what I've been shown, with or without the light necessary to see as I should. What good are they, these eyes that look at the world, to the world . . . I am asking. I … Continue reading Standing Under [Flash Fiction]

To look, to watch, to gaze, to see, I see, I gaze, I watch, to guard, I look, at and for, all in themselves with my eyes, how many eyes, the eyes I have in my head focussed on objects and persons in the world,the eyes in my mind, the eyes of whichever self I … Continue reading Look Watch Gaze [prose poem]

DEAD AHEAD I am not a woman and thus do not have a womb and thus cannot bear children and thus will never have the dilemma of abortion before me; this should not, thought, keep me from understanding her sash is when she is wherever she might be facing this dilemma––and dilemma is certainly even … Continue reading Iceberg, Dead Ahead

for Julio Cortazar "By a monstrosity I presume is meant some considerable deviation of structure, generally injurious, or not useful to the species." ----Charles Darwin I He looks left. He looks right. He looks forward. He looks about the subway car to the advertisements. He looks once more to the people around him, what kind … Continue reading Cum Grano [prose poem]

What is it that he must say or must do? He thinks about this without the words, and he does so quite seriously as if he were supposed to listen to someone speaking to him over his shoulder, someone over and above the I-am everyone has at his disposal; that is, rather than he was … Continue reading Remembrance is not a Day [a short-short story]

How many self-conscious days passed before he could be completely relaxed, comfortable even, with the laughter of strangers, these others around him. When was it that he had become impervious even to the remote possibility that others were laughing at him, so loudly as others sometimes would, and in such close proximity. He often used … Continue reading A Wince [Flash Fiction]

Je me deux, said Rimbaud in a letter to a friend; yes, I two myself.  Has there ever been a more succinct yet eloquent expression of the human Self struggling with its unity? --Jay V. R. Absence is absence the way a chair is a chair or a pig is a pig and not a table; that … Continue reading 2 I and Thou [A Short-short Story]

  for Giorgio de Chirico These are the abbreviated facts about what he thinks about metaphysical thinking without getting into an explication of metaphysics, or so I think he should want to say about what he says, but do say so myself about him and what he thinks has thought will continue to think I … Continue reading An Archaeology of First Principles [Flash Fiction]

The coldest winter? The snowiest winter . . . polar vortices . . . superlatives were abundantly overflowing this winter. Cold winters in New York are not unusual; mild ones are not anomalies either. One winter colder than another is unavoidable; but we do get ourselves worked up over the superlative degree: yes, the coldest, … Continue reading [h] Superlatives [A Short Story]

I used to imagine Montaigne sitting in his study and saying "I'd like it if I could sit down one day and have an I-to-I with me and me and me." --Jay V. R. Having an I-to-I 'He' is for persons in English, he used to say. All things are referred to singularly by the … Continue reading 3 I to I [A Short-short Story]

Two cups of coffee . Two friends in Cafe Mogador. "I have a solution for crime," she said. "What is it?" He asked. "Crucifixion," she said. He asked, "Crucifixion?" "Yes," she said, "we must crucify criminals. Nail them to their crosses." "Crucify them?" He asked. I won't say how. "There is no other way, really," … Continue reading Salvation Now [Flash Fiction]

Prologue I dream, I read, I write, I rewrite, I see again everything in many forms, the same things revised. Vision, revision; I look at, I look for, I look to you . . . what is it that I see when I drop so much I have to carry, hold up, stand under? I … Continue reading 5 God’s Finger to Adam’s [A Short Story]

I did not know L----. I did not know his parents. I am not Jewish. If I were I would not be Orthodox. This is not a condemnation of orthodoxy. If I were Jewish I would most likely be like the friends I grew up with in East Flatbush Brooklyn, reformed. I am merely filtering … Continue reading [d] God the Ungodly [A Short-short Story]

for Frederick , Michel and William The non-locatable Self of many, many selves . . . is it necessary for me to draw this out? He could, you know, but then what does that say, really, all this drawing out in detail--is everything really in the details? He remembers something like this from his good … Continue reading A Dialectic of Selfhood [Flash Fiction]

[If I were Humpty Dumpty--what would I do if I were? And why do we assume that Humpty is always an egg?] I I feel like Humpty Dumpty sitting on his wall, my wall, do not sit on the wall, the fence, which side are you on, boy, which side are you on? No fence-sitting … Continue reading [b] The Perils of an Anthropomorphic Egg [A Short Story]

Hockey was once touted as the world's fastest game . . . I remember the old Garden on 8th Avenue between 48th Street and 49th street, I think, yes, I can see the marquee outside the front like a theater marquee, the lobby entrance with the banner reading, Hockey, the world's fastest game, or was … Continue reading Re-memory [Flash Fiction]

  I daylight fading shadows stretching infant fingers into their skins I see a leaf fall from a tree, the last leaf on the tree I see. The woods I walked when I was a boy by Aunt Mae's in the Berkshires; Housatonic River Valley tributaries webbing the terrain . . . what is there … Continue reading [c] Falling through Bamboo [A Short Story]

The character of this piece has not been well drawn in the specifics that pertain to him and to him alone, but have been drawn in type, a die if you will, casting--no pun intended, unless there is an unconscious intention to what I say, and I guess I could agree with that without having … Continue reading Macrocosmically Me [Flash Fiction]

He cannot say with any accuracy what it was he felt when the doctor came out to tell him his father had died, having been outside the room as the team with the machines tried or did not try to save him, his dad, as he thought later, not having trusted the hospital his father … Continue reading Less Than; or Looking for More from Where it is not Likely Going to Come [Flash Fiction]

Anolie hears the clock in the hall ticking. She pauses to listen to the clock ticking. She thinks about the tick tick tick of the ticking clock in the hall ticking as other clocks might tick, may have ticked, she thinks she can recall; the clock continues to tick like it has for as long … Continue reading Had Fallen [Flash Fiction]

A singular vision is an exceptional one. A singular person is a person of exceptional qualities. Now a singularity in astrophysics is another term for black hole, an exceptional occurence in stellar evolution. The matter of a particularly massive star at the end of its life collapses, thus increasing its density where then its gravitational … Continue reading Toward a Philosophy of the Self in Analogy with Singularities [Flash Fiction]

A man discusses another man and in discussing this other man touches on a few significant points that could appear in anyone's theory of being, what it means to be, what it might mean not to be---and how this not to be is either the cessation of being or the endurance of becoming. This limits … Continue reading He is therefore He Thinks [Flash Fiction]

[What the man says he sees, he sees as he says, and so says surely he sees it, thus why he says what he says how he says it when he does.] the Character Sketch of a Man Fighting Off Pessimism Can Show You How to Engage Your Next Meditation On Death I see a … Continue reading How the Character Sketch of a Man Fighting Off Pessimism Can Show You How to Engage Your Next Meditation On Death

She thinks again about what she wants for lunch. She pauses once more about what she should get for lunch. A third time about maybe having what she had decided on having when she was leaving the park earlier, a few minutes ago, the number of them that it takes to walk to where she … Continue reading In My Whole Life, I Never Saw a Rabbit [Flash Fiction]

[I am going to tell a story {in the first person} of a man who tells the story of a man who has very strong political opinions about international politics, geopolitics in the middle east, and the role of the United States government in what he sees as the overarching political dogmas and received ideas … Continue reading Media, Messages and Menschen? [A Short Story]