Kurt Vonnegut

He never quit smoking.

He called smoking his slow suicide.

He divorced his wife

and remarried another woman.

He adopted his sister's children

when she died and then wrote

about his love for his sister

and his struggle to find love

for her children with his imagination.

The critics panned it. Slapstick.

He gave himself a D grade

in Palm Sunday,

his autobiographical collage.

He may have tried to kill himself in 1985,

the year I was born.

Do you want your children taught?

Words from a suicide case?

Do you want your children taught?

Words from a divorcee suicide case?

He was captured by German forces

at the Battle of the Bulge

when he served in the European theater

during World War Two.

He regularly drew assholes

with a felt tip pen.

He attempted to write a war memoir

and this is from that book:

  "People aren't supposed to look back. I'm certainly not going to do it anymore.

I've finished my war book now. The next one I write is going to be fun.

This one is a failure, and had to be, since it was written by a pillar of salt. It begins like this:

Listen:"

- Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse Five

On November tenth, 1973

at an American school in North Dakota

this book was burned 

rather unceremoniously

in the basement boiler.

The word motherfucker 

prompted the burning.

A couple of motherfuckers

in over two hundred pages. 

I wonder if anyone at the school

actually read the book.

He wrote the school a letter in anger

stating he was real 

and his thoughts were real

and his thoughts about the situation 

disappointed him. 

He was from Indiana

and he was not particularly proud of that

most of the time

which makes sense if you are from Indiana.
But he was proud, sometimes.

Hopeful skepticism.

He continued writing

because he had to keep writing.

What do you have to keep doing,

Mitch Daniels?

I want to know 

because I do not know.

He wrote because it was all he could do

with his loneliness.

His writing brings peace.

What do your actions do

other than bring anxiety?

Maybe your biography will answer someday.

I doubt it.

Aaron C. Molden