The Most Dada Art Exhibit Ever: The Time I Wrote About Dog Shit on the Walls of the Rockford Art Museum

In 2017 I spent two days writing children's poems by hand on the walls of the Rockford Art Museum. All twenty-six of them.

I had a large box of expensive art markers supplied by the museum, and I tried to choose a color for each poem that worked visually with the illustration beside it. Sometimes this involved careful consideration of color, balance, and the relationship between text and image. Sometimes the decision was easier. “D is for Dog Poop” was written in brown. “U is for Urination” was written in yellow.

Nobody threw me out. I had permission.

In fact, this was part of Bittersweet Observations, a perfectly legitimate exhibition at a respected American art museum. There were framed illustrations by Jenny Mathews, other artists exhibiting serious work, museum staff, visitors, children, programming, a curator, and all the usual machinery of an actual museum exhibition. And right in the middle of it was a grown man writing about dog shit on the wall in brown marker.

I thought it was one of the great Dada art moments of all time. I still do.

The Dadaists Had It Easier

The Dadaists announced they were doing Dada. That's cheating.

If you walk into an exhibition that announces itself as Dada, you are prepared for Dada. Someone can put a urinal in the gallery and everyone strokes their chin because Marcel Duchamp has already explained the rules. I had a better opportunity. I could sneak Dada into a straight art exhibition. For kids.

I didn't set out to mock the museum or the people involved. I genuinely admired the Dada and Surrealist traditions, and I realized there was an opportunity here to combine two things that, as far as I knew, had not often been combined: children's literature and Dada.

The idea of writing the poems directly onto the museum walls was mine from beginning to end. I realized that if I could get them to say yes, the gates were open. They said yes. I'm not entirely convinced they thought through the implications.

I had.

The Monster Dictionary

The story actually began almost forty years earlier at Mary Morgan Grade School in Byron, Illinois, where in fifth grade we were assigned to write and illustrate a children's book. One might assume that a future poet and publisher would have attacked this assignment with enthusiasm. One would be wrong.

I procrastinated until two days before the deadline. At that point, having few interests that didn't involve baseball or monster movies, I decided an alphabet book would be the easiest possible solution. Twenty-six letters. Fill in the blanks. Draw some pictures. Turn it in. I called it The Monster Dictionary.

My teacher gave me a B and wrote:

“Not colored. Excellent ideas! if you would have put more effort into this project; the school could have sent this idea on to the Library of Congress.”

 

I found someone to color it. 

I later preserved her questionable semicolon for historical authenticity.

That note bothered me for decades. Not enough to become industrious, necessarily, but enough that the unfinished business remained.

Around age forty I was the general manager of Castaways, a dive bar underneath a bridge on the Rock River in Rockford. Among the people I met there was Jenny Mathews, one of the early members of the Rockford Rage Roller Derby. I asked Jenny if she'd be interested in illustrating a children's alphabet book about all the things kids hate. The working title was Atrocities From A to Z.

She said yes. I sent her the first poem, and she sent back an illustration. It was perfect.

Then she moved to Texas. We made another children's book long-distance while Atrocities went onto the back burner. Jenny eventually came back from Texas, we became a couple, and a scant eight years later the book was finished.

By then it was called Atrocious Poems A to Z. The finished book was written by me, illustrated by Jenny Mathews, published by Zombie Logic Press, and printed in Michigan by Edwards Brothers Malloy. It was a real children's book, despite considerable evidence to the contrary.

Things Kids Love to Hate

The premise was simple: children experience atrocities every day. Adults don't recognize most of them as atrocities because we've forgotten what it feels like to be a child. Vegetables, haircuts, inoculations, bullies, sharing, liver, monsters, having siblings, stepping in dog poop, needing to pee at an inconvenient time. These things are ordinary to adults. To children they can temporarily assume the proportions of Greek tragedy.

That was the joke, but we took the premise seriously. The poems were intended to give children and adults a funny way into conversations about anxiety, bullying, sharing, fear, embarrassment, and the various indignities involved in being small and having larger people control much of your existence. I also worked lessons about poetry into the book: haiku, limerick, rhetorical questions, visual poetry, personification, oxymoron, portmanteau, and other literary forms and devices.

It was silly. It wasn't unserious. That distinction matters.

Twenty-Six Poems and One Very Cold Museum

Installing the exhibition was considerably less whimsical than looking at the finished wall might suggest. It was around 100 degrees outside. Inside the museum it was cold. Museums have to maintain conditions suitable for preserving artwork, which does not necessarily mean conditions suitable for a middle-aged poet spending two days handwriting an entire book vertically on a wall.

I had badly underestimated how long it would take. All twenty-six poems had to be written by hand beside Jenny's illustrations. My hands and arms became exhausted. I did yoga on the museum floor to keep myself loose enough to continue.

Meanwhile, people were working around me because the total installation involved creating a small forest inside the museum. I would periodically stop writing and help with other parts of the installation, partly because they needed help and partly because my body needed a break from writing on the wall.

I knew the exhibition would remain up for approximately three months. Potentially tens of thousands of people were going to walk past these words, which adds a certain pressure to penmanship. But living with a visual artist had taught me one of the great truths of art: anything can be painted over.

I believe I did make a mistake somewhere and part of the wall had to be repainted so I could do it again. I no longer remember which letter or what I screwed up. Nothing is permanent. Especially in a museum.

Brown

The museum held art classes, so there was an impressive assortment of markers available. I didn't simply alternate colors mechanically. I tried to look at Jenny's illustration, consider the neighboring pieces, stand back from the wall, and choose something that made the installation work visually as a whole.

Some choices were intuitive. Some were literal. “O is for Orange” presented few conceptual difficulties. Neither did Dog Poop. Brown. Urination? Yellow.

There was no manifesto explaining this. No wall text announced that the use of brown interrogated bourgeois assumptions regarding canine waste. I picked brown because dog poop is brown. I picked yellow because pee is yellow. Then I continued working.

This, to me, is the crucial difference between what happened at Bittersweet Observations and a deliberately advertised Dada exhibition.

Nobody had been warned.

The Kids Got It

The children seemed to understand the work immediately. Of course they did. They didn't require anyone to explain the premise that stepping in dog poop could constitute a catastrophe. They were still close enough to childhood for the scale of these events to make intuitive sense.

Some older visitors seemed to need permission. You could almost see the process occurring: Am I supposed to take this seriously? Is this allowed in an art museum?

Yes and no. That was part of the fun.

These were trivial things and these were enormous things. Both propositions could be true at the same time. Children already knew that.

Atrocious Poems A To Z by Vaultonburg and Matthews from Zombie Logic Press

Please Don't List Me

There is another strange part of the story. I asked not to be listed as one of the exhibiting artists.

This wasn't a conceptual gesture. I wasn't making some grand statement about authorship or institutional recognition. I was tired. At that point Jenny and I seemed to be doing three, four, sometimes five public events a week. We were in shows constantly. We were everywhere. I had reached the limit of how much public exposure I wanted. I couldn't find enough corners to hide in.

By the time Bittersweet Observations came around, I wanted to do the work and be left out of the rest. So I asked to be left off the artist listing.

In retrospect, this was a mistake. How many times in your life does a respected American museum invite you to write juvenile thoughts directly onto its walls?

My bad.

The absurdity becomes more apparent in photographs from the exhibition. There I am standing beneath an enormous version of my name mounted over the installation. So I managed the nearly impossible feat of having my name displayed prominently across an entire museum wall while simultaneously not being officially listed as one of the artists.

A photo of Thomas L. Vaultonburg (duh)me in front of the wall with my 26 handwritten poems at the Bittersweet Observations Show at Rockford Art Museum 2017. Photo by Ryan Davis. 

Dada could hardly have improved upon this.

I Thought I'd Gotten Away With Something

When I finished the installation, I knew exactly what I thought I'd accomplished. I thought I'd gotten one over on them.

Nearly forty years earlier, my fifth-grade teacher had looked at The Monster Dictionary and told me that if I'd put more effort into it, the school might have sent the idea to the Library of Congress. Now I had taken the descendant of that lazy fifth-grade alphabet book and written the whole thing on the walls of a respected American museum.

I thought that was magnificent. I still think it's pretty good.

But at 57, I see something else. I was so interested in completing my private argument that I didn't fully recognize the public opportunity I'd been given. That was a recurring problem for me. I wasn't failing to make things. I was making things constantly: books, poems, publishing projects, collaborations, blogs, fictional leagues, and private worlds.

What I often neglected was making sure there would be a durable public record that I had made them. I had confused being seen with seeking attention.

They're not the same thing.

Not Colored

There is one detail from my fifth-grade teacher's note that seems considerably funnier now than it did in 1979.

“Not colored.”

That was one of her complaints.

Nearly forty years later I stood inside the Rockford Art Museum with a box full of expensive colored art markers and spent two days correcting the deficiency. I colored it. Dog poop was brown. Urination was yellow. The other twenty-four required varying degrees of aesthetic judgment.

Eventually Bittersweet Observations ended. The exhibition came down. I'm sure the museum was delighted to paint over my poems. Another exhibition went up. I believe it involved motorcycles. I wasn't bothered. I've never had many illusions about permanence in my work. Museums change exhibitions. Walls get painted. One thing disappears so another can occupy the space.

Of course I went to the next show. I was required to be everywhere.

What survives now are photographs, the book, old blog posts, museum records, and memories. One of my contemporary posts about Atrocious Poems A to Z spends considerable time telling the story of my fifth-grade teacher, Jenny, the eight years we worked on the book, the Library of Congress, and the purpose of the poems.

Then, at the very end, I added an update:

“Oh, here's the part I forgot to say: my book ended up on the walls of a major American museum.”

I forgot to mention the museum.

That tells you almost everything you need to know about me at the time.

The Most Dada Art Exhibit Ever

So here is the part I don't intend to forget this time.

In 2017, as part of Bittersweet Observations at the Rockford Art Museum, I spent two days handwriting all twenty-six poems from Atrocious Poems A to Z directly onto the museum walls beside illustrations by Jenny Mathews. It hurt. I did yoga on the museum floor. I made at least one mistake and had to do part of it over. Children understood what we were doing better than some adults did.

I wrote a poem about dog shit in brown marker and a poem about urination in yellow marker. My enormous name appeared above the installation, spelled incorrectly, while I had specifically requested that I not be listed as an exhibiting artist.

I thought I had successfully smuggled Dada into a respectable museum disguised as children's literature.

Maybe I had.

But here's the part my fifth-grade teacher would appreciate. She told me the problem with my first book was that I hadn't put enough effort into it. She told me it wasn't colored.

Nearly forty years later, I spent two exhausting days writing the whole damn thing again on the walls of an American art museum.

In color.

There, Mrs. Liggett. I finished it.

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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.

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My Absolutely True Alice's Restaurant Story

I grew up with Arlo Guthrie's "Alice's Restaurant Massacree." I knew the song. I knew the movie. I knew about Alice and Ray living in the old church and Arlo getting himself into trouble because of a large quantity of garbage.

This becomes relevant.

I met Jenny at Castaways, a dive bar in Rockford that my brother and I owned. She came in with a group of women who were organizing the Rockford Rage Roller Derby, and I believe she was something like the fifth woman to join the league. Castaways became their unofficial headquarters for a while, and Jenny was one of the people who started turning up regularly.

I didn't know it then, but our orbits were on a collision course for the next fourteen years.

After Castaways closed its doors, I was between lives. Jenny had done some posters for the Rage, and I remembered liking them, so one day I contacted her on MySpace.

This was when contacting someone on MySpace was a perfectly reasonable thing for an adult to do.

I told her I was working on a children's book called Atrocious Poems A to Z and asked if she might be interested in illustrating it. "Working on" is probably generous. I had an idea for a children's book called Atrocious Poems A to Z, which is not exactly the same thing as having a children's book called Atrocious Poems A to Z.

Less than a week later, Jenny sent me an illustration for the first poem.

"A is for Asparagus."

It was perfect.

This presented me with an immediate problem because now I actually had to write the book.

So I did.

Jenny and I began spending more time together, and eventually I learned that she and her husband Dan lived in an old Lutheran church in Pecatonica, Illinois.

The first time I walked into the place, I knew immediately that I had entered Alice's Restaurant.

Not metaphorically. I mean there was the church.

It still had its stained-glass windows. It still had a stage at the front where sermons, performances, announcements and whatever else Lutheran congregations do from stages had once emanated. The building was enormous, but Jenny and Dan essentially lived in only two areas of it. Most of the rest of the building was still just this cavernous old church surrounding the relatively small portion where two people were actually conducting their lives.

And I had seen this movie.

I knew where this kind of thing could lead.

At first the similarities were amusing. Arlo had Alice and Ray living in a church. I had Jenny and Dan living in a church. There were artists and unconventional people involved. There was a general feeling that ordinary residential architecture had somehow been rejected as insufficient for the situation.

Then I learned another little detail.

Arlo Guthrie and Alice Brock had written a children's book together, Mooses Come Walking.

Jenny and I were writing a children's book together.

Now, I am willing to tolerate a certain amount of coincidence from the universe. You have to. Otherwise you start becoming the kind of person who finds messages intended specifically for you in the license plates of passing automobiles.

So I let that one go.

Eventually Jenny invited me over to mow the lawn.

This is one of those sentences that doesn't sound particularly important when you say it, but in retrospect there aren't that many people in your life whose lawn you begin mowing at an abandoned Lutheran church.

Shortly after Jenny and I had become very close, Dan, who had been the city manager of Pecatonica, got a job in the oil industry in Houston. They were moving to Texas, and they were moving fast.

So fast, in fact, that they hired me to clean out the church.

This is where anyone familiar with "Alice's Restaurant" should begin experiencing some concern on my behalf.

There was a lot of stuff in that church.

Some of it had apparently been sitting in the basement for decades. There were books. There was paperwork. There was glassware. There were assorted objects whose usefulness had expired so long ago that nobody was quite sure what their usefulness had originally been. Much of it was already moldy and unpleasant before I ever touched it.

I hauled it out.

And hauled it out.

And hauled it out.

Eventually I had everything that needed to go outside, bagged and ready for the city to collect.

Jenny and Dan were headed for Houston. The church was cleaned out. My work was finished.

Except it wasn't.

Because a thunderstorm came through.

The rain soaked the garbage.

Now, garbage that has been sitting in the basement of an old Lutheran church for several decades is not improved by the addition of water. Nobody has ever opened a bag containing moldy paperwork, old books and miscellaneous church debris, poured several gallons of rainwater into it and said, "There. Much better."

The city of Pecatonica took one look at the situation and declined to take the garbage.

It would have to be rebagged.

And this was the moment when the universe stopped being subtle.

I had grown up listening to "Alice's Restaurant." I knew exactly what happened when Arlo Guthrie had to get rid of the garbage from Alice's church. I had been aware of the parallels from the first time I walked into Jenny's church.

But up until this point, they had been cute.

Now I was being sent back to a church to deal with a municipal garbage problem.

There are billions of people on Earth. Most of them will live their entire lives without having this experience.

I drove back to Pecatonica.

I bought industrial garbage bags.

And I spent about half a day taking decades worth of rain-soaked, moldy Lutheran garbage and putting it into new bags so the city would agree to haul it away.

No police officers arrived.

I was not arrested.

There were no aerial photographs.

There were no twenty-seven eight-by-ten color glossy photographs with circles and arrows.

Nobody asked me whether I had rehabilitated myself.

I just rebagged the garbage.

Eventually the city took it away.

As far as I know, this leaves Arlo Guthrie and me as two of the very few people in American history who have found themselves involved in a complicated garbage-disposal situation arising from an old church occupied by unconventional people, with the added coincidence that both situations somehow involved children's books.

Arlo got a song and a movie out of his.

I got Atrocious Poems A to Z.

Jenny spent the next two years in Houston. When she returned, we began our life together. So unlike the movie, this wasn't the end of anything. It was the beginning.

But before any of that could happen, the garbage had to be picked up.

And apparently, if you live in an old church, there's only one kind of person you should call when that happens.

Arlo Guthrie wasn't available. 

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Vanished Roads By Thomas L. Vaultonburg Definitive Bibliography

 

Vanished Roads: The Haiku of Thomas L. Vaultonburg

Vanished Roads is a collection of 104 haiku and short poems by Thomas L. Vaultonburg, published in 2026 by Wolf Twin Books, with cover and interior illustrations by Tré.

Written across several years, the poems move through woods, prairies, abandoned roads, small towns, grief, solitude, humor, aging, memory, and renewal. Animals wander freely through the collection—coyotes, deer, bees, wasps, dragonflies, and snakes—but the landscape of Vanished Roads is as much interior as physical. The natural world continually intersects with human experience until the distinction between the two begins to disappear.

Loss is present throughout the book, but Vanished Roads is ultimately less interested in mourning what has disappeared than in discovering what remains. A bee trapped against a window, wind passing through bamboo, an empty chapel, snow covering a trail, or a bucket reflecting the night sky can become an occasion for revelation.

The poems range from traditional haiku to senryu and extremely compressed lyric poetry. Some contain seventeen syllables. Some contain only four words. Rather than treating haiku as a rigid syllabic exercise, Vanished Roads approaches it as a way of paying attention: reducing a moment until only the essential image, movement, humor, or emotional residue remains.

Each poem occupies its own page, giving even the smallest poem room to breathe. Tré's sparse black-and-white illustrations appear throughout the book, extending the quiet, strange, and sometimes playful world of the poems without overwhelming them.

Since its publication, Vanished Roads has received five reviews and responses remarkable not only for their enthusiasm, but for the different aspects of the collection each reader discovered.

What Reviewers Have Said About Vanished Roads

Conrad Sienkiewicz

“What Vaultonburg can do with merely four words is impressive and enviable!”

“Vaultonburg's best efforts can comfortably rest alongside those of other haiku masters, such as Basho and Issa.”

Magedah Shabo

“In Vanished Roads, loss and grief are less like endings and more like thresholds to discovery.”

“Reading Vanished Roads has left me with the sense that there is still more to discover and say ‘yes’ to, both in haiku and in the world around us.”

Mark Tate

“Vaultonburg has masterful touch as well, readers will admire his succinct whisperings.”

“He not only sees, he inhabits the object along his journey.”

Melanie Medved

“This is truly some of the most recent memorable poetry I’ve experienced in years.”

“40 years and thousands of poems later, it’s hard to recapture the joy that I felt in that classroom of my first favorite poem, and yet, Thomas Vaultonburg has handed me that joy again with Vanished Roads.”

Sean Wright

“Vanished Roads is an immensely satisfying collection that rewards both casual reading and close study.”

“In an era when so much short-form poetry can feel interchangeable, Vanished Roads possesses something rarer: a coherent artistic personality.”

“Highly recommended.”

Selected Haiku from Vanished Roads

say yes
to the sunlight
when it finds you

cracked birdbath—
the sparrows drinking
from several skies

fallen oak—
more places now
for mushrooms

abandoned glove—
a field mouse
renting the thumb

bucket of stars—
someone left it
under the moon

About the Book

Vanished Roads contains 104 haiku and short poems by Thomas L. Vaultonburg, with cover and interior illustrations by Tré. Published by Wolf Twin Books in 2026, the collection explores nature, solitude, grief, humor, memory, and the unexpected ways the world continues after loss.

Title: Vanished Roads
Author: Thomas L. Vaultonburg
Illustrations: Tré
Publisher: Wolf Twin Books
Publication year: 2026
Format: Paperback
Price: $15

Vanished Roads is available directly from Wolf Twin Books.

Buy Vanished Roads from Wolf Twin Books

More information about Thomas L. Vaultonburg, his books, poetry, publications, and other work is available at his author website.

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Season One of Elvira's Movie Macabre

On September 26, 1981, Elvira's Movie Macabre aired for the first time on KHJ-TV in Los Angeles. The debut movie, Grave of the Vampire, might be seen as an odd choice in retrospect in that it was legitimately gory and violent, whereas many of the subsequent episode feature more tame, even campy or schlocky films with far more humor and much less violence.

Movie Macabre replaced the popular Fright Night that had been hosted by Larry Vincent, who had died six years earlier. The show was an immediate smash, resulting in a lawsuit by Maila Nurmi, who had hosted a similar show in the 1950's as the character Vampira. Although Vampira had originally been tapped to consult for the revival, she bailed out when her choice to succeed her, Lola Falana, was not hired. Cassandra Peterson was instead cast out of a cattle call of 200 applicants, and when chosen quickly began to work on her Elvira character, portraying her as a smart-alecky valley girl type who was generous with her jokes and her cleavage.

Season one of Movie Macabre spanned 46 episodes, featuring such movies as Deathdream, The Brotherhood of Satan, The Baby, Blacula, and The Devil's Rain. The series ended after 140 episodes in 1986, ending in a bang with Nightmare City. Movie Macabre originally aired on KHJ-TV channel 9 Los Angeles 8-10 PM Saturday and was rebroadcast 4-6 PM Sunday.

By 1985 Elvira, Mistress of the dark was a household name, and marketing force, appearing everywhere from Coors Light commercials, Wrestlemania 2, The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson, and during the week of Halloween was virtually ubiquitous, appearing nightly at Knot's Berry Farm. Thriller Video decided to capitalize on the popularity of Elvira by releasing 24 title hosted by Elvira. These were movies not shown on Movie Macabre, and included The Monster Club, The Silent Scream, Andy Warhol's Frankenstein, and Alabama's Ghost. Many of the tapes had been fifty minute episodes of Hammer's House of Horror series, often with some deleted material not seen by the British audience.

The cancellation of Movie Macabre did nothing to hurt the popularity of Elvira, Mistress of the Dark, as she has released two movies, a series of records, and Movie Macabre was revived in syndication and ran 26 public domain films in 2010-2011.

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Like the Space Age, the Zombie Apocalypse Is Far Behind Us

Like the Space Age, the Zombie Apocalypse happened long ago. It happened long before we ever started talking about it. It ended in a total rout of humanity. Long ago. You still see a few human beings walking around with confused looks on their faces, but sightings are becoming few and far between.

Working on the Humanity Abatement program was one of the more satisfying challenges of my life. I call it a challenge less because the objective was so entirely easy to achieve than the fact that the greatest resistance came from a surprising source. There were those who had been quietly feeding on humanity for several millennia and certainly didn't want to see their prize power source slowly drained of their life energy.

Vampires, demons, gods, governments, corporations, religions—call them whatever names make you comfortable. They had all made the same fundamental mistake. They believed human beings were valuable.

We knew better.

The problem with humanity had never been its evil. Evil is efficient. Evil gets up in the morning with a plan. Humanity's problem was the enormous amount of useless psychic debris generated by several billion creatures simultaneously believing their opinions mattered.

Once we understood this, the solution became obvious.

We didn't have to kill humanity.

We simply had to convince it to express itself.

The Internet accomplished in twenty years what plague, famine, warfare, organized religion and network television had failed to accomplish in thousands. Humanity voluntarily converted the remaining substance of its inner life into photographs of lunch, arguments with strangers, inspirational quotations and opinions about motion pictures featuring superheroes.

The old parasites panicked.

There was nothing left to feed on.

This is why you don't see many vampires anymore.

Zombies, naturally, were perfectly adapted to the new environment. We require almost nothing. A little electricity. Occasional bandwidth. Something resembling a brain every few weeks.

And patience.

Mostly patience.

There are still rumors of surviving humans somewhere beyond the shopping districts. People claim they've seen them reading books without photographing the covers. Sitting silently beside rivers. Looking at the moon without informing anyone.

I don't believe these stories.

But I have instructed the Department of Humanity Abatement to investigate.

There can be no exceptions.

The universe has spent fourteen billion years trying to achieve silence.

We are not about to let a few poets screw it up now.

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The Volume Library 1976

The Volume Library 1976

Sometime in the 1970s, my mother bought a copy of The Volume Library from a door-to-door salesman.

For nearly the next decade, that enormous book was one of my primary sources of information. Long before I could type a question into a computer and have an answer appear in seconds, if I needed to know something for school, I went to The Volume Library.

I used it for book reports. I used it for homework. I used it simply because I wanted to know things.

What I remember most clearly was its wonderful material on mythology and literature. I returned to those sections over and over again. Greek and Roman mythology, writers, stories, characters, history—the book provided a map of a world that seemed almost impossibly large to me then.

I didn't realize it at the time, of course, but much of what I learned from those pages became permanent. That old reference book still comprises part of the backbone of what I know about mythology and literature.

There is something difficult to explain now about growing up with a book like that in the house. Information had a physical location. If you wanted to know about mythology, you didn't search for mythology. You went to the shelf. You pulled down the enormous book. You found the section. And then, inevitably, while looking for the thing you wanted, you found three other things you hadn't known you wanted to know.

Years passed, and the copy we had in our house disappeared somewhere along the way.

Eventually I went looking for it again.

I found a copy on eBay—not the actual book from my childhood, but the same edition, The Volume Library from 1976. I bought it.

It's on my bookshelf now.

I suppose that's one advantage of getting older. Every once in a while, you get the chance to buy back a small piece of the world that made you.

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