Listen:
We all turn to pumpkins at midnight.
When music is reduced to violet light
and hum, we give ourselves over to its garden.
So it goes.
The song’s prelude is a girl who levitates,
chooses flight over foible.
Four boys drink beer behind her,
brown bottles in absent-minded vibrato,
the perihelion of table and hip
a lingering pulse in the station’s desolation.
A bell rings in the distance.
She stares at the schedule—its reds,
blacks and yellows. Tiny vixen,
these colors that seduce with repetition:
Ankunft, ankunft,
coming coming coming.
How soothing,
the familiarity of numbers, lists
straight down like steel beams, tracks.
She aches for the implicit motion
found in fives, nines, the button-
candy colons that satiate,
utilitarian, sweet, and for the
infinity spooled into eights.
Her thumbs warm burrows,
her shirt that runs
to her hips, lies like sugar.
Syncopated from ankle to lip,
she seethes with lotus, acorn,
the need to be filled with babies.
A bell rings in the distance.
Somewhere in the bridge, I talk to Billy.
Explain in pedal tones that
this is not the how or the why,
the explanation for amber.
This is your nap in the wagon, Billy,
green and coffin-shaped.
My tequila, my Nurnberg,
my Fourth of July.
Anticipation licks her neck,
thick and weighted as salt,
and she begins to swell with numbers:
Five, five, five-o-five. Nine ten. Nine twenty-five.
Eighteighteighteighteight.
Their laughter a bull
in the bottoms of her sixes,
a slump against her sevens.
A blackbody spectrum, she is enlightened,
nirvana. Love made through the window,
and their bottles meant for the blood
gutter of her back. Amazing, the fit.
This is it. Communion
living in the air, waiting
for open mouths. Wind
connecting souls at will.
Water and wafers.
The song’s coda is a girl who levitates,
chooses silver boots
over glass slippers,
melts wafers.
I promise you nothing but wind.
Water and sunshine’s serendipity.
Holy, holy, holy.
It will come again.
In the form of a coffin,
green and wagon-shaped.
You pick:
Diamond?
Denture?

____

In this poem, I tried to combine Vonnegut's prose style and imagery withthe belief that there is some power or energy out there that makes life worth living. I think each person calls that belief by a different name. Also, read Slaughterhouse-Five again. It's worth it.