Just Raven About Vonnegut

A Poe Substitute for Good Literature

(Illustration by Carole LaRoche, Carole LaRoche Gallery, Santa Fe)

I don’t even know what to call this thing. It’s not this week’s fresh story – I already posted that on Sunday night. The Gobble-uns’ll Git You dealt with poetry and scary stuff and the author Kurt Vonnegut. It put me in a funny poetic mood, hoping to unite those three elements again. I promise this won’t happen often.

Look at it this way. You will never - not ever - see a more outrageous rhyme than one in the third verse, so it’s worth it, just for that!

Once upon a midnight windy, in my home in Northside Indy
Reading quaint and curious volumes of forgotten prose
Suddenly there came a pecking, on our freshly painted decking
As of someone gently checking, checking where this doorway goes
“Tis some visitor,” I muttered, “pecking with a pointy nose”
“Only this, so I supposed”

It was in the bleak October, I was not completely sober
I was reading works by Kurt, a lot of those
I had stumbled from Broad Ripple, where I’d gone to have a tipple,
Dry Martini, double, triple, triple, yes, just one of those
Near home, a flashing neon sign beseeched me, “Eat at Joe’s”
In the bitter, bracing, wind, my fingers froze

At SeaWorld, in the Otter House, I’d started reading Slaughterhouse
My affection for his writing only grows
Fell in love with “Mother Night,” but didn’t understand it, quite
Re-read it just the other night and now, who knows?
This writer doesn’t wrap his tales in Christmas bows,
But never are his novels too verbose

Open here I flung the curtain, there I saw it, knew for certain
Herein flew a stately raven, striking a defiant pose,
Startled, I beheld the raven, features etched and sharply graven
Seeking here secure haven far away from all his woes
Saw my bookshelves, on reflection, he approved of my collection, all in rows,
Quoth the raven, ”So it goes…”

So now, the two of us amigos – I always go wherever he goes -
Spend happy nights and days in Vonnegutian throes
The two of us will each take out, our very favorite Kilgore Trout
And spitball what he’s all about, when reading those
“He’s selling cheap storm windows in Cohoes?”
Quoth the raven, ”So it goes…”

Please support the Kurt Vonnegut Museum and Library