Welcome to the Monkey House

November 2006

Whee! Self-examination – and physics!… there are explanations behind most of the weirder epithets. Oh, and credit where credit is due: Welcome to the Monkey House is a collection of Vonnegut’s short stories, which I highly recommend. “Who Am I This Time?” is a story in that collection.

God bless the reckless instinct that asks “Who am I this time?”
The reckless rose, in restless prose, by any other name–
Oh, any other name! Let fly the mercy of the indistinct parade, the
Eccentric in elegant armor, the haberdasher by night, or the

Dear occupant, this space must be vacated. Please disperse, sincerely,
Who is it this time? Chance stranger to myself some days, lost
In a suitcase, a writer of love songs, a gypsy moth, one who
Worships the dawn, but sleeps through it.

A builder of chance cathedrals, made a sweeper of floors
In industrial corrugated steel-on-concrete. He who stares intently at the
Radio, the washed-out green, the nervous spatter of five AM
Highway drowning in static and rain-swept grays.

And yet explodes the unexpected moment, Who am I this time?
He who wakes to buzzing lip and jangling nerves. Energy,
Electric, inexhaustibly awake – to become, toward becoming, an echo of the
Senseless sky, an agent of an empty room, an incoherent –
Schroedinger’s Self, a barely shrouded storm.