Auto Wreck is a disturbing, dark and haunting poem written by Karl Shapiro about death, fate, coincidence and the view of reality. In this harsh poem Shapiro describes a terrible car accident in which many people end up dying. It flawlessly uses unique imagery and language that gives the reader a clear and true sense of the terrible incident. The author makes us feel as if we have seen and even experienced the car accident ourselves. Even though it can be seen that the main focus of this poem is death, which is one of the most important, the poet also adds how he and everyone else saw everything after the accident, how their emotions and how they imagined reality afterwards. . Shapiro not only acknowledges and makes vivid the deaths that just occurred and how different people reacted, but also discusses how much it was really an accident, how someone had to be guilty, and whether anyone was truly innocent. First, Shapiro begins by describing the efficient and rapidly approaching ambulance to the accident site. He begins with a “sweet” allusion to death and life when he compares the sound of the siren to a heart “beating, beating,” and the ambulance lights to blood “pulsing” from “an artery.” When the ambulance arrives at the scene of the accident the doors open and the light comes out, which was a way for the author to give a fleeting hope of life in the chaotic scene of the accident, and then take it away when he describes the condition in where the victims were put in the ambulance when it says "the mutilated lifted... and placed in the small hospital". Shapiro gives the impression of the inevitable presence of death when he says, “Then the bell,…, instruments once,” as the… center of the card… has no logic or rational conclusion when he says that this event “undoes our physics” and that “splashes everything we knew about the epilogue.” In the end it states how things happen even if they are not convenient and attributes the quality of evil to something that in reality cannot be. In conclusion, Shapiro leaves the reader in a state of bewilderment that would be the same as if the reader were actually present in the wrecked car. He himself displays confusion, never settling for a complete solution, never finding a cause for the deaths he, the witness, had just observed. He seems perplexed on the question of why bad things happen to good people. Finally, questions such as: was it really an accident?, was the cause simply being in the wrong place at the wrong time?, was it a twist of fate?, or even, was it an accident with cause and effect?, remained unanswered.