he_fucked_us_in_the_end Vancroupe Walking down a lamp lit parkway, I wonder if there is really is something that connects it all - the black shapes around me, the stream beneath that wooden bridge, the autumn leaves bristling about my feet, the fading edges of concrete, vanishing into obscurity. When the wind rushes down, rippling the final sheafs of green on the trees, it sounds like the ocean. And I am alone. But everything is so beautiful, so perfect, so simple, so... content. Change is all around me, yet there seems to be a stasis, like a telephone pole in the midst of migration. Stasis in change. And I am alone. And I am happy. And I wonder, what ever gave us the idea that we should not be? That we are not alone, and if we are, we should aspire to something other? Sometimes, all of us, these beautiful, complex, static, changing creatures, we feel that no matter how close we are to another, how linked our souls may be, we are still alone. But at this moment, knowing that, it does not make me sad. Quite on the contrary, in fact. Sometimes I wonder if its just us. That if we do eventually meet some far off visitors from the dim reaches of space, that they would marvel at how in the hell we managed to get along. Just how in the hell we managed to delude our lives by a truth steeped in abatement. We are all of us alone; just indiviual bundles of memories and feelings and thoughts, shuffling about, trying in vain to connect, to anyone, anything. And once we do, we're back to square one again. Yup, He fucked us in the end. 041112 ... william carlos williams If when my wife is sleeping and the baby and Kathleen are sleeping and the sun is a flame-white disc in silken mists above shining trees,— if I in my north room dance naked, grotesquely before my mirror waving my shirt round my head and singing softly to myself: "I am lonely, lonely, I was born to be lonely, I am best so!" If I admire my arms, my face, my shoulders, flanks, buttocks against the yellow drawn shades,— Who shall say I am not the happy genius of my household? 041112 what's it to you? who go blather from