Modern Day Trout

“He is a modern day Kilgore Trout,”
the anything-but-famous screenwriter
explained as we unpacked brochures
to hand out to survivors on Armistice Day.
And in rip-tide currents that had brought
Trout south to us from his non-fiction
home of Michigan you could sense Motown
in its head-long, decades old plunge
towards a post-industrial Valhalla
for urban farmers, graffiti artists,
and tight jean bike riders had shed
a free radical in honor of a man
who had crafted the finest legend
of a science fiction writer and left us
with a sense the we had been left
apologizing to Mrs. Rosewater
for every war that we had someone else
pay for. And as our real world
Kilgore Trout descended the steps
of the World War Memorial on that fair
weather Sunday, free t-shirts
under arm, you had the sense
that he was the artificer of everything
in a slipstream trailer full of every fiction
we’ve ever read. Each downward step
a gospel declaring that some of us
are more true to the way we want to be,
so much so that our lives are reflected
in those pages and their dialogue tags.