Vanished Roads By Thomas L. Vaultonburg: A Haiku Journey Through Grief and Back Into the World

 Book Review of Vanished Roads  A Haiku Journey Through Grief and Back Into the World

by Millard Rausch, University of Pennsylvania

Vanished Roads is less a collection of individual haiku than a journey told in small moments. Thomas L. Vaultonburg begins in grief and isolation and gradually moves outward, into forests, mountains, rivers, animals, weather, and finally a renewed sense of belonging in the world.

Wolf Twin Books

The poems are spare, but many contain an unexpected turn that changes the image completely. A bare tree is still capable of holding the sky. A power outage gives the stars their old jobs back. A bucket drawn from a mountain well comes up full of stars. Elsewhere, coyotes deliver sermons, hats become pilgrims, and a mountain path worth following is precisely the one that goes nowhere.

What impressed me most is the architecture of the book. Images and ideas recur and transform as the poems progress. Doors, roads, wounds, reflections, footsteps and names gradually give way to a speaker becoming less separate from the landscape around him. By the final poems, the distinction between traveler and wilderness has nearly disappeared.

Tré's black-and-white illustrations are used sparingly and beautifully, giving certain poems room to expand visually without overwhelming their simplicity.

There is grief here, but Vanished Roads isn't ultimately a book about remaining inside grief. It's about what happens afterward: walking long enough to discover that the world is still strange, funny, beautiful, and capable of receiving you.

A thoughtful collection for readers of contemporary haiku, nature poetry, and short contemplative writing.

-Dr. Millard Rausch

 

Tea With the Tigress: Ten Years Inside the Strange Machinery of a Life

Tea With the Tigress: Ten Years Inside the Strange Machinery of a Life

I don't think Tea With the Tigress is primarily a book of love poems, although love is everywhere in it.

I don't think it's primarily a book about sex, although there is plenty of that too.

And despite the number of poems involving death, loneliness, aging, memory, physical vulnerability, poetry, absurdity, wolves, celestial bodies, Richard Brautigan, used clothing, zombies, alcohol, buses and people behaving badly, it isn't really a book about any of those things either.

I think Tea With the Tigress is a book about being returned to the world.

That is much easier for me to see now than it was when the book appeared in 2023.

The subtitle is Poems 2010–2020, which makes the collection something of an accidental autobiography. The poems weren't written to document a decade. They accumulated while a decade was happening. When gathered together, however, they preserve something a deliberately written memoir probably couldn't: the strange proportions by which a life is actually experienced.

Huge things sometimes occupy three lines.

A ridiculous thing can occupy a page.

Sex becomes astrophysics. A trip becomes a joke. A flower becomes an existential event. The human heart becomes machinery. An answering machine becomes an excuse to make jokes about dead composers.

And somehow all of it belongs together.

The opening poem, "Tigress," contains the proposition upon which much of the book operates:

when a wise man meets
Tigress in the jungle, he
says, thank you, my love

It is funny, but it isn't merely funny. The tiger isn't defeated. The tiger isn't domesticated. The supposedly wise man recognizes what has arrived and gives thanks for it.

That's a pretty good introduction to the next eighty pages.

The World Comes Back

Reading the old Zombie Logic Blog alongside these poems makes the decade feel much less abstract.

There I am watching horror movies at ridiculous hours. Collecting Monster Club artifacts. Playing old computer RPGs. Writing about Hot Wheels, Queen albums, Hamm's beer signs, pennies, fantasy football, poetry feuds, Richard Brautigan, bad jokes and things I found on my hard drive. I invent Dr. Millard Rausch's post-zombie-apocalypse biography. I create imaginary Outsider Poetry organizations. I remember motel rooms. I make jokes about Presidential Physical Fitness Awards.

And I keep writing poems.

It would be easy to dismiss all of that as clutter. I don't anymore.

It's the material of the life.

One of the smallest poems in Tea With the Tigress is "Avocation":

since you never
had time
to behold
this particular
downspout
I went ahead
and did it
for you.

That little poem may explain a surprisingly large portion of my work.

Someone has to look at the downspout.

Someone has to remember the forgotten movie, the weird sign, the motel, the bus station, the ridiculous conversation, the object nobody else thought worth saving. Someone has to look at all the supposedly insignificant things while everyone else is busy looking at the significant ones.

That was what Zombie Logic Blog was doing during these years, too.

And apparently so was I.

Jenny Enters the Poems

But there is another enormous presence in Tea With the Tigress: Jenny.

Not simply Jenny as subject, but Jenny as an alternative way of encountering the world.

One of my favorite examples now is "May." The speaker is in his laboratory "pissing away April" while she is in her studio preparing the colors of the coming month. He wants to interrupt her but fears that doing so will cause "Garbageman Green / Peonies" and "Poopsicle Lilies" to erupt from him.

Having recently revisited the old Zombie Logic posts, that poem suddenly looks almost documentary.

Again and again in those entries, I wander into a room and Jenny has made something.

Sometimes I understand it.

Sometimes I don't.

Sometimes it takes me four paintings to figure out what she's doing.

The domestic world of these poems isn't presented as retreat from the larger world. It is where the larger world keeps appearing. Tea, paintings, dresses, desks, flowers, food, bodies and jokes continually open trapdoors into something enormous.

"Waiting" may be the clearest early statement of it. Love is compared first to an apple harvested too early, then startlingly to a heart awaiting a surgeon's scalpel, and finally to tea being prepared for afternoons of conversation at a shared desk. The poem ends with two people occupying the same room separately, waiting for their love "to steep."

That double desk may be one of the most important locations in the book.

Not Paris.

Not Greenwich Village.

Not some mythical poet's garret.

A double desk.

Two people making things.

The Body Becomes Strange

The body in Tea With the Tigress is never entirely dependable.

Sometimes it is erotic. Sometimes comic. Sometimes cosmic. Sometimes it is essentially a machine whose warranty has become questionable.

In "What Makes Me Tick," the speaker's mechanical aortic valve becomes something simultaneously industrial and alive:

My St. Jude 27 vavgj-515
Mechanical aortic valve
Thuds like a war bird's wings
In a hummingbird feeder.

That's one of the central transformations of the collection.

The machinery doesn't destroy the poetry.

It becomes poetry.

Later, in "Changing Lanes On an Empty Highway At 3:22 A.M.," the speaker takes inventory of medications, operations, age and diminishing speed, then cautiously moves into the passing lane anyway. He knows something "younger, faster, / More capable" will eventually overtake him.

But for a moment he accelerates.

That strikes me now as one of the key poems in the collection.

There is no grand declaration of triumph.

The car changes lanes.

That's enough.

And Then There Is Sex

There is a lot of sex in this book.

Some of it is tender. Some is ridiculous. Some becomes astronomy, geography, classical music, wine criticism or military history because apparently simply describing sex would have been too straightforward.

"The Yellow River" turns a drunken navigational error in bed into a disastrous military incursion and concludes, perfectly, "War is hell."

"Sunday" sets up an elaborate sexual encounter before revealing in its final joke that the activity under discussion is apparently doing the taxes.

"Astrophysics" calculates a kiss along the Y axis of a shoulder as though intimacy were celestial navigation.

This is important because the erotic poems aren't really interruptions of the more serious material.

They are the same material.

The body that can break is also the body that desires.

The body that ages still reaches for another body.

The body that contains machinery still wants to dance.

Mortality doesn't negate appetite in this book. Mortality makes appetite urgent.

The Poet as Fool

There is also an argument about poetry running through Tea With the Tigress, and the poet generally loses it.

Good.

"The Old Hermit Speaks of Poetry" imagines poems escaping like ducks from a broken pen. Instead of chasing them, the old poet drinks his wine and wanders into the hills, only to discover that the poems have been waiting there all along—in rocks, trees and a brook laughing at the fool searching for them.

"Discourses In Poetics" takes the solemn master-and-acolyte tradition and slowly dismantles it until the Master is apparently attempting to access someone's bank account.

That's closer to my conception of poetry than any manifesto I could write.

Poetry matters tremendously.

Poets should therefore probably not be trusted with it.

The dedication page establishes the governing philosophy before the collection properly begins, quoting my middle-school principal Joe Parks: "Mr. Vaultonburg, you amuse only yourself."

Forty years later, that seems less like criticism than permission.

The Old World Is Still There

The book isn't entirely domestic renewal and comic eroticism.

Older ghosts keep wandering through it.

"Playing the Short Stack," which we've just encountered again while rehabilitating the Zombie Logic archive, reduces an entire losing position to a poker table where the speaker can't formulate a comeback because he can't even see his opponent behind her mountain of chips.

"Pockets" imagines wearing a dead stranger's Salvation Army suit while typing poems on a Smith Corona and occasionally checking the pockets to see whether the previous owner left instructions.

"Beaten" needs four lines:

Every face
At the bus station
Is a torn
Lottery ticket.

Those poems come from the same imaginative territory as the older Zombie Logic material we've been excavating: buses, bars, thrift stores, motel rooms, people who have lost, people who are still playing anyway.

But something has changed.

The speaker isn't quite as trapped inside that world anymore.

He can look back at it.

From Tigress to Wolves

The final portion of the collection begins to sound noticeably different.

The poems become quieter.

More elemental.

Wolves appear. Trees appear. The moon appears. Solitude stops being merely isolation and starts becoming a landscape.

"Unravel" may be the hinge:

as i unravel
I become miles of new thread
to weave with again

That poem now sounds almost prophetic.

By the time we reach "Lilacs," the heart is described as a bomb shelter emerging from an "endless / Winter of discontent." The speaker remains wary of love, but the window is open.

And then comes "Full Wolf Moon 2020":

full wolf moon bays down
on grey, oily streets howling
for its lost lover

Read from the vantage point of 2026, it is difficult not to hear the poet who would eventually write Small Songs for Weary Travelers beginning to emerge.

The attention is changing.

The jokes aren't gone. The weirdness isn't gone. The city isn't gone.

But the poems have started looking outward.

Tea With the Tigress

That's why I think the title is better than I previously understood.

The Tigress isn't simply a woman.

She isn't merely love or sexuality either.

The Tigress is life when it becomes dangerous enough to be worth approaching again.

The wise man doesn't conquer her.

He doesn't explain her.

He meets her.

And says thank you.

Across Tea With the Tigress, the speaker repeatedly does exactly that. He says thank you to love, sex, absurdity, art, jokes, bodies, mechanical parts, memories, old clothes, bad decisions, flowers, wolves, buses, darkness and another day in which something strange might still happen.

The book ends near grief, but it doesn't end in defeat. "End Punctuation" imagines two people leaning into one another like parentheses around the story of their love.

That's an extraordinarily appropriate image for the collection.

Because Tea With the Tigress is itself a set of parentheses.

2010–2020.

Ten years enclosed between them.

Inside are several lives, a tremendous amount of nonsense, some darkness, quite a bit of sex, a mechanical heart, a double desk, a woman making paintings in the next room, wolves gathering at the edges, and a poet gradually discovering that surviving the world and paying attention to it may actually be the same activity.

The copyright page credits Jenny Mathews with the cover and illustrations for "Halloween 1974" and "The Perfect Crime," while Tré created the remaining artwork and provided design and editing help. That makes the physical book itself strangely appropriate: other people helped surround these poems with images and give the decade a shape.

And perhaps that's what I see most clearly now, after going back through the old blog.

I thought I was wasting an astonishing amount of time.

Watching movies. Writing jokes. Collecting things. Looking out windows. Making blogs nobody seemed to read. Falling in love. Getting older. Writing poems about downspouts.

Turns out I was living.

And fortunately, I wrote some of it down.

Say Yes To the Sunlight When It Finds You

 

Some days offer no revelation, no grand solution, no sudden change of direction. They simply open for a moment and let a little light through.

This piece grew from one of the simplest ideas in Vanished Roads: when something good reaches you, however briefly, don't argue with it. The dandelion has no trouble understanding this.

Say yes to the sunlight when it finds you.

Say Yes To the Sunlight When It Finds You is an acrylic painting by Thomas L. Vaultonburg based on an illustration by Tré from page 96 of their 2026 book Vanished Roads from Wolf Twin Books

 

Prairie Zen: Five More Haiku from the Midwest

Prairie Zen begins with a simple proposition: the ordinary world is enough.

It doesn't require a temple, a distant mountain, or a landscape untouched by people. In the Midwest, the natural and human worlds have been tangled together for generations. Fields meet subdivisions. Birds nest in abandoned buildings. Goldenrod takes over vacant lots. Creeks run beside highways. Trees outlive fences, farms, houses, and sometimes the people who planted them.

Prairie Zen pays attention to that world without demanding that it become prettier, purer, or more profound than it already is.

This is particularly suited to a place like Rockford and northern Illinois. We live in a landscape people frequently underestimate. There are no oceans or dramatic mountain ranges demanding attention. Much of what happens here happens quietly: weather crossing a field, weeds reclaiming disturbed ground, an old orchard surviving after the road to it has disappeared.

The poems below offer five more ways of approaching Prairie Zen.

1.

pasture fence—
one walnut tree
older than the wire

Three lines contain two different understandings of time.

The fence represents the human landscape: property lines, ownership, agriculture, division. Someone decided where one piece of land ended and another began and stretched wire across it.

The walnut tree belongs to another chronology.

It was there before the boundary. If the fence eventually rusts into the grass, the tree may still be there afterward.

Prairie Zen frequently notices this difference between human time and landscape time. Our arrangements can seem permanent because they last longer than we do. The landscape has another definition of permanent.

2.

subdivision dusk—
fireflies returning
to no field at all

This is Prairie Zen after development.

The poem doesn't pretend the subdivision isn't there, nor does it turn into a lecture about what replaced the field. Instead, it watches the fireflies return.

That word—returning—carries the poem.

The insects behave according to an older map. Their presence briefly reveals another landscape underneath the one we have constructed.

This is important to Prairie Zen because nature isn't somewhere else. It persists in drainage ditches, yards, vacant lots, highway margins and subdivisions. The distinction we make between the human world and the natural world is considerably cleaner than the world itself.

3.

farm auction—
the lilacs
staying put

This one is almost brutally Midwestern.

A farm auction marks an ending. Machinery, furniture, tools and possessions accumulated across a life can be tagged, priced and carried away by strangers.

The lilacs aren't participating.

They remain beside the house.

There is sadness here, but the poem doesn't instruct us to be sad. That's another characteristic of Prairie Zen: emotion can emerge from accurately observing the world instead of being announced by the poet.

The auction disperses one human life.

The lilacs bloom where they were planted.

4.

drainage ditch—
a mallard pair
lower their standards

Prairie Zen also needs this poem because Prairie Zen cannot be allowed to become unbearably solemn.

The joke depends upon our hierarchy of landscapes. A pristine wetland is beautiful. A drainage ditch is infrastructure. Surely respectable ducks should have better accommodations.

The ducks don't care.

To the mallards, water is water.

There's something quietly useful in that. Human beings spend tremendous energy ranking places, experiences, careers, possessions and ourselves. The mallards encounter a ditch and see somewhere to land.

Sometimes enlightenment has webbed feet and questionable real-estate standards.

5.

vacant lot—
goldenrod
without witnesses

This might be one of the purest Prairie Zen poems in the larger group.

A vacant lot is defined in human language by absence. Something should supposedly be there—a house, a store, a factory, a parking lot—but isn't.

Goldenrod has a different assessment.

It flowers.

And the final line removes us from the equation altogether. The goldenrod doesn't bloom so someone can appreciate it. Beauty doesn't require an audience. The world doesn't become meaningful when a human being arrives to observe it.

Indeed, the poet's greatest accomplishment here may be noticing something that would have happened exactly the same way without him.

A Zen Native to This Place

Prairie Zen isn't an attempt to paste an imported spiritual vocabulary over the Midwest. It grows from looking closely at the place itself.

The prairie has already been plowed, fenced, paved, abandoned, replanted and developed. Rivers have been redirected. Factories have closed. Farms have become subdivisions. Vacant lots have become small accidental prairies. Yet everywhere, other lives continue negotiating with what we've made.

The walnut tree outlasts the wire. Fireflies return to the missing field. Lilacs remain after the auction. Mallards accept the drainage ditch. Goldenrod flowers without anybody watching.

There is no pristine world to return to.

There is this one.

Prairie Zen begins there.

 

In Defense of the Unnecessary Sentence

There are easier ways to spend an afternoon than reading poetry.

You could organize the garage.

Learn a marketable skill.

Watch a video titled Seven Habits of Highly Effective People Who Wake Up at 4:00 A.M.

Instead, someone sits down with a poem.

For a few minutes, absolutely nothing measurable happens.

No shelf gets built.

No lawn gets mowed.

The GDP remains stubbornly unchanged.

Yet somehow the world has one more person who noticed the way rain sounds on a metal roof, or remembered their grandmother's kitchen, or paused long enough to wonder why crows always seem to know more than they're telling us.

Literature has always suffered from this problem.

It refuses to justify itself in practical terms.

A novel cannot patch your roof.

A sonnet will not rotate your tires.

A haiku won't remind you where you left your car keys.

What literature does instead is preserve attention.

It reminds us that looking closely is not the same thing as wasting time.

In an age that rewards speed, literature quietly rewards patience.

That seems like a fair trade.

So here's to the unnecessary sentence.

May there always be writers willing to write it, editors willing to publish it, and readers willing to stop long enough to let it do its quiet work.

 

Prairie Zen: Finding the Extraordinary in the Midwest

When people hear the word Zen, many picture distant mountains, bamboo forests, or carefully tended Japanese gardens. I think Zen is closer than that.

It lives in limestone creek beds after a hard rain.

It waits in restored prairie grasses bending beneath the wind.

It watches from the fence post where a red-tailed hawk settles over an Illinois field.

Prairie Zen is the practice of paying attention to the landscapes many people drive past without seeing. It isn't about escaping where we are. It's about inhabiting it completely.

My own haiku grew out of the forests, rivers, rail corridors, and changing seasons of northern Illinois. These places taught me that stillness isn't reserved for monasteries. It exists beside county roads, beneath cottonwoods, in forgotten cemeteries, and along the Rock River.

A prairie has its own silence.

Its own weather.

Its own way of teaching impermanence.

Rather than searching for enlightenment somewhere else, Prairie Zen asks a simpler question:

What happens if we truly notice the place we already call home?

That question lies behind much of my recent work, including Vanished Roads. The poems are rooted in the Midwest—not as scenery, but as a living practice of observation. Every bird call, every shifting cloud, every abandoned road becomes an invitation to pay closer attention.

Zen has always emphasized direct experience.

The prairie offers it freely.

---

Thomas L. Vaultonburg is a Rockford, Illinois poet, founder of Zombie Logic Press, and author of Vanished Roads and other collections exploring haiku, nature, and the evolving idea of Prairie Zen.

Rockford Pages Captain Thomas L. Vaultonburg Writes Second Children's Book

Rockford Pages poetry slam team captain Thomas L. Vaultonburg has written his second children's book, titled Atrocious Poems A To Z, and it will available on Amazon June 9th. 

Also, Vaultonburg has been invited to write the 26 poems that comprise the book on the wall of the Rockford Art museum to accompany the illustration by Rockford artist Jenny Mathews. 

The exhibition, titled Bittersweet Observations, will have a public opening June 9th at 6:30 P.m., and copies of the book will be available in the gift shop at the Rockford Art Museum afterwards. 

Atrocious Poems A To Z is a book Vaultonburg began writing in the 5th grade at Mary Morgan Grade School in Byron, Illinois, as a class project. He always wanted to finsish the book and see it in publication, and almost forty years later his dream has come true.

Eye Rhyme is an example of the poems in the book. It has an ingrained literary lesson as well as attempting to deal with issues that are anxiet-inducing for children. "I wanted to write something that would be in opposition to all the shut the fuck up and go to bed books being aimed at children," Vaultonburg said in a phone interview. "The stresses of childhood are very real and serious for children, and as adults we form this sort of parental amnesia where we forget how hard it is being a child. I wanted to take those everyday stresses seriously, but not too seriously."

Atrocious Poems A to Z By Thomas L. Vaultonburg

Atrocious Poems A to Z by Thomas L. Vaultonburg

Then I'd rebuild the opening of the post so a search engine immediately understands book + author + publisher + genre + relationship to your current work. Something like this:

Atrocious Poems A to Z is a poetry book by Rockford, Illinois poet Thomas L. Vaultonburg, originally published by Zombie Logic Press. Illustrated by Jenny Mathews, the collection approaches the alphabet with the dark humor, absurdity, playfulness, and occasional grotesquerie that characterized much of Vaultonburg's earlier poetry.

The book belongs to an earlier period of Vaultonburg's work, before the increasingly spare nature poetry and haiku that would lead to books including Moonscape, Small Songs for Weary Travelers, and Vanished Roads. Seen in retrospect, however, some of the same concerns are already present: overlooked objects, mortality, strange transformations, Midwestern landscapes, humor, and the collision between ordinary life and the surreal.

Thomas L. Vaultonburg is a Rockford poet and the founder of Zombie Logic Press and co-founder of Wolf Twin Books. His more recent work has increasingly centered on haiku, nature observation, walking, and an approach he describes as Prairie Zen—a Midwestern poetics grounded in close attention to the ordinary world.

His 2026 collection Vanished Roads, published by Wolf Twin Books, continues that movement toward compressed, observational poetry, bringing together 104 haiku and short poems concerned with disappearance, memory, landscape, grief, humor, and renewal.

Atrocious Poems A to Z remains part of that larger body of work: a considerably noisier and more mischievous relative of the poems that came later.

 

Titles Available By Rockford Poetry Publisher Zombie Logic Press

It was twenty-five years ago three years ago when my first book, Concave Buddha, was published by The Press of the Third Mind in Chicago. It is a press that had also published Bradley Lastname and Philip Lamantia, so I was very excited to be in that company.

The cover incorporated a piece by artist Joel Peter Whittier. 

There wasn't much talk about it locally, but they sold a lot of copies in Chicago and New York. I remember that a lot of older small press poets were a little bitter about it because it wasn't usual for a new poet to have a full-length book with a glossy cover right out of the chutes. Nowadays that doesn't mean much because of digital printing, but I didn't hold any grudges about it. The publisher simply liked my work and thought it fit in with his Dadaist style, so he published it. All these years later I now publish books and try to follow his example of being open to new writers. There's no point being a snob in an industry where there's so little at stake in the first place.

I have published three books by Rockford writers recently. The Zen of Beard Trimming by C.J. Campbell, and The Blood Dark Sea by Outlaw Poet Dennis Gulling.

The Blood Dark Sea by Dennis Gulling

I have a few other titles I hope to publish in the next couple of years. As far as I know Zombie Logic Press is the only literary press in Rockford, and has been all the twenty years I have been operating it. I'd really like to let the region and the nation know that we have a literary presence. That's the goal of the Rock River Literary Series. 

Rockford Outsider Poetry Publisher Zombie Logic Turns Twenty

Twenty years ago in October I founded Zombie Logic Press. Mainly I did so to publish my second book, Detached Retinas. I was soon to be working in the restaurant business and didn't have many intentions of publishing much more anytime soon.

And I didn't. 

But as far as I know I was the first person to use the term Zombie Logic or apply it to a going concern such as a literary press. 

Now, after twenty years of being continuously in business I edit The Rock River Literary Series, which promotes writers from Rockford, Illinois, and edit two literary journals, Zombie Logic Review and Outsider Poetry. 

Zombie Logic Press

For the last decade now I have been doing so from Downtown Rockford. When I settled in this building on the Holmes Block almost no one else was running a business Downtown anymore. A few restaurants on Block Five, but that was about it. The citizens were terrified to come Downtown. 

Eventually a coffee shop opened up. But still the historic building decayed and rotted. The roof collapsed on the Midway Theater, and the privileged white class stayed away in droves. If they ever did talk about Downtown it was in a negative way. 

I liked it here, though, back then. I remember going for walks late at night through virtually deserted streets. I liked the buildings that local vultures had been squatting on for a couple of decades as they turned to dust. I never once was accosted or even approached by anyone despite the hue and cry by smug East Siders that if you go Downtown you will get mugged. It was safe here.

Until they moved in. The very East Siders who had criticized Downtown for decades. Suddenly it didn't feel as safe anymore. But not for the reasons they said.

Because of them. 

Rockford Poetry 2016

Recently it was announced that Rockford has been named the FBI's #1 most violent city in America under 200,000 in population, supplanting Little Rock, Arkansas. I sat in the Amtrak stop in my train car for a half hour once in Little Rock looking at what must have been the Capitol building because it was a grand, beautifully lit structure, and if all I ever knew of Little Rock was that half hour I'd guess that Little Rock was a paradise.

Chamber of Commerce types attempt the same sort of obfuscation here in Rockford. I suppose it's their job to try to convince outsiders the good is better than it is and the bad doesn't really exist except in the mind's of cynics. But here in the real world we're constantly reminded by the inconvenient facts. Number one most violent city in America, third fattest, dumbest and most miserable respectively. These rah rah types try to be clever and play it off with Tshirts and civic campaigns like Misery Loves Company, but it all comes off in the end like a bunch of vultures who got their meal ticket punched watching the city burn from a safe distance while they simultaneously profit off dumbass Tshirts. 

The calendar has flipped over into October, and as all the other months have done for some time now October breaks from the gate at a breakneck pace. Fall Art Scene is this weekend, but after that Jenny promises we will slow down, and I'm grateful. September and October are my favorite months, but I spent most of September worrying about my health. I hope to enjoy October this year, really let it sink in.

Collected all my recent poetry in a file on this very computer while I was at Zombie Logic Press headquarters a couple of weeks ago, and a few times recently I have felt caught up as a human being. I know that just means I'm about to fall woefully behind, but for now I am moving slow and enjoying things. 

The Cubs are in the playoffs. My fantasy football teams are doing well. It has not gotten bitterly cold outside yet, and I don't have to worry about camping again until next year. 

Up, Up An Away In Jenny's Beautiful Balloon

Would you like to take a ride in my beautiful balloon?

Balloons by artist Jenny Mathews 

Yes, I would like to be in one of these beautiful balloons instead of watching this dumb football game hoping some ding dongs I don't care about will score a point. I don't know if I'd like to be up this high in a balloon as it looks a little dangerous. 

I think Jimmy Webb wrote the 5th Dimension song "Up Up and Away," and I believe he also wrote the song for which Sir Richard Harris was knighted for, "McCarthur Park." Someone left their cake out in the rain. Jenny bought me that album long ago, so long ago it was years before we even had a turntable to play it on, which we still haven't. 

Rockford poetry is going strong they say. 

Football game is over. One of my regular contributors at Zombie Logic Review was writing me from Dublin today. And at Outsider Poetry we have regular contributors from Scotland, England, and Wales. 

Everyone except me went to Geek'd Con this weekend. They got me a Don't Panic towel, but now I'm panicked about whether I should use it or not.

Maybe a photo is in order. 

Mine doesn't look like this, but I was too lazy to take a picture because I'm watching The House That Bled To Death.

And Rockford Poetry Will Never Be the Same

I finally organized all the poems I have written since the last book, Submerged Structure, into a file on my computer. I had to round them up from the cosmic reaches of the galaxy, or at least from ten different blogs and two old computers. I think I found most of them, and few of them still impress me. Nonetheless it feels good to have them cataloged.

Rockford was named the most dangerous city in America under 200,000 people by one source today. Earlier in the week someone carjacked a taxi and led police on a high speed chase through Downtown after firing shots at the police. I heard it after midnight Tuesday but it's not at all unusual to hear sirens all night.

The next afternoon someone had to be talked off the State Street bridge.

Pretty much a normal week in Rockford.

Let me see if I can find one of those poems I haven't published anywhere else because I am tired of writing today.

Using Your Medical Card

Please keep your card in a safe
Place and never allow anyone
Else to receive the benefit of
Disinterested medical care

Fear not the apathy of
Underpayed practitioners
Concerned more about their 
Student loans than 
Your pancreas

Ye shall surely not die

But there's no harm in taking
These dress rehearsals more seriously.
-Thomas L. Vaultonburg

Not very good. Probably won't make it into the next book, but it's alright for tonight. I never seem to get to the end of my own medical appointments, but hopefully I'll be done with dental work soon. What a mess I had made for myself not going to the dentist in twenty years. 

Rockford Pages poet Thomas L. Vaultonburg rides a bicycle

The Cubs played to their first tie in over ten years tonight. I sat there waiting for the game to start again, but it never did, so they went into the radio broadcast of the Thursday Night Football game. 

That's all. Going to eat my organic black eyed peas and quinoa meal now. 

Rockford Pages Poet Gets Shiny New Teeth

Outsider poet Thomas L. Vaultonburg recently got some shiny new teeth. At least on line he did. As was pointed out by his father thirty-five years ago, there's no point fixing your teeth because someone is just going to knock them out, anyway. Which as a prediction didn't turn out to be as bad as others, but thirty five years later an amazing advance in human technology called dentistry allows me to actually get thirty years of neglect repaired. At least semi-repaired.

After two years of dental work I expect to look like this 

And when that happens I intend to run for public office.

But before that the 2017 Outsider Poetry Slam League of America season. I was originally traded to Chemung, as my mother always told me I would be, but have become a free agent and will be competing for the Rockford Pages.

It gets dark and rains again as I write, and in a half hour I will do my final fantasy football draft of the season. Something on the right side of my body hurts a little more than I think it should, but I'm so sick of medical procedures I'm putting off having it checked out in hopes that it's something I have two of. 

My teeth never looked like that. They started getting knocked out early and often, and at this late date I'm just happy to have what I have left. This is the first opportunity after decades of service jobs to get them fixed. 

Poetry. Fantasy football. We may be getting a dog this Fall. I have no idea what kind I'd even like. But it will be nice to have a dog around again. 

Outsider Poet and the Demon Belphegor Team Up For Spoken Word Album

The Outsider Poet and the demon prince Belphegor have announced they will team up for a spoken word album which will drop early in 2017. Belphegor, a demon notorious for tempting humans to be lazy and inspiring them to devise devious means and ingenious methods to do so, convinced Vaultonburg, founder and CEO of Zombie Logic Press, called by NPR "America's most dangerous literary press," that the album would save him a great deal of time trying to upload his videos to YouTube. 

The Moabites were familiar with the temptations of this old scourge, who they referred to as Baal-Peor, but apparently his emergence in the West is a new phenomenon. 

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As August turns into September there's really not much to do, and no good reason to do much at all, I find. The Fall harvest should be bountiful, and things will go on largely without obstacles. We'll all outlast our late summer colds, perhaps buy that Polo Autumn jacket we've been fancying for a few years now, and prepare for winter, but not too hard.

Don't force it, just let it come naturally.

Rockford Page Appears at Local Folk Festival

Outsider poet Thomas L. Vaultonburg, formerly of the Rockford Pages outsider poetry slam team, appeared at the Willow Creek Folk Festival earlier in August, performing the classic "Wagon Wheel" all three nights on the open stage, as long as a spoken word recitation he composed extemperaneously for the approving crowd. 

Many in the audience commented that he looked a little bit like a lobster. But they were just being shellfish.

Vaultonburg also challenged the rule that dogs and drunks were not allowed on the stage, which happens to be inside the confines of the church yard, by inviting a drunken Norwegian Elkhound to join him on stage for a rollicking version of "Lady of Spain." Vaultonburg has subsequently been banned from appearing at the Willow Creek Folk Festival for a period of five years. On the upside, though, the Elkhound has joined Jimmy Buffet on his national tour. 

In other news involving the Rockford Pages poetry slam team, the 2017 season will soon be upon us, and several venues in Rockford will serve as bout venues the upcoming season. Including the Outsider Poetry Depot and Shep's Supper Club. 

Aside from this, it's fantasy football season, so reports will be sparse from this reporter for a few months. I also bought an 8 Track player so I'll be out on the search for 8 Track tapes and updating my fantasy football lineups.