An Acrostic for Kurt Vonnegut

by ZHENYA YEVTUSHENKO | Honorable Mention, student poetry contest

“Well, here we are Mr. Pilgrim, trapped in the amber of this moment. There is no why.”

—Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse Five

Kilgore Trout sits in his basement,

talks to his decrepit parrot and writes.

Unaware of our eyes,

Trout crafts messy storylines, he disdains his audience.

Readers are nothing and everything to Trout—or is

that simply you laughing at yourself, Mr. Vonnegut?

Trout dreams dystopian dreams

in his dark fiction deep inside our darker fiction.

Victims of a series of accidents—that’s humanity,

marvelous moments aimlessly ruined into marble.

Order is not time, but rusty clockwork gears

they bite like beartraps, and breaks manifest

a zigzag in the poetry of time, this

—whatever it is—

is the amber teardrop of a moment

there is no why.

Never knew many unharmful truths but

here I live in the results of harmful untruths.

Nights in Dresden, firestorms

flooding streets, melting humans into soup, so it goes.

Evil nights faced by you—or was

that Billy Pilgrim?

Gravely with a gentleness, I now see the Cat’s Cradle looping

truths and lies.

Underneath the social satire, past stop-starts, a blood-soaked

Slaughterhouse, was hope.

There was music, and everything was beautiful and nothing hurt.