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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Say Yes To The Sunlight When It Finds You

Sometimes the sun just finds you. Sometimes you need go on a journey to get to the place where the sun finds you. Either way, say yes to the sunlight when it finds you. 

Say Yes to the Sunlight When It Finds You, acrylic painting by Thomas L. Vaultonburg, 2026. Based on an illustration by Tré from the haiku collection Vanished Roads.

My sunlight

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Prairie Zen and the World That Doesn't Need Fixing

Prairie Zen is not really interested in escape.

There is no requirement to leave the city, climb a mountain, enter a monastery, or discover some landscape human beings haven't already complicated. Prairie Zen starts wherever you happen to be: beside a road, behind an abandoned building, at the edge of an orchard, looking into a cracked birdbath.

What matters is the quality of attention brought to the place.

Much of modern life teaches us to look at the world and immediately ask what should be done with it. Land should be developed. Buildings should be occupied. Broken things should be replaced. Weeds should be removed. Problems should be solved. Even nature becomes something to manage, improve, photograph, preserve, monetize, or explain.

Prairie Zen asks a quieter question:

What if, for a moment, we didn't fix anything?

These five haiku all encounter worlds that are damaged, abandoned, imperfect, or simply beyond our control. None asks the world to become something else.

1.

cracked birdbath—
the sparrows drinking
from several skies

Illustration by Tré from Vanished Roads by Thomas L. Vaultonburg

 

The birdbath is broken. That is the human assessment of the situation.

The sparrows apparently weren't consulted.

The cracks divide the reflected sky into fragments, transforming a defect into multiplicity: not one sky, but several. Nothing about the birdbath has actually been repaired. The poem simply changes what we're capable of seeing.

That's central to Prairie Zen. Acceptance isn't pretending that broken things aren't broken. It is refusing to believe brokenness exhausts their possibilities.

The sparrows still get their water.

And somehow they get several skies with it.

2.

fallen oak—
more places now
for mushrooms

 

Again, the first line appears to announce a loss.

A mature oak has fallen. From the human perspective—and perhaps even from the perspective of someone who loved that particular tree—something important has ended.

But ecosystems don't organize themselves around our preference for keeping things as they are.

The fallen tree becomes habitat. Fungi arrive. Insects arrive. Nutrients return to the soil. Death doesn't disappear from the poem, but neither does life wait politely for our mourning to conclude.

Prairie Zen doesn't offer the comforting cliché that everything happens for a reason.

It suggests something stranger and more observable:

everything that happens becomes part of what happens next.

3.

abandoned glove—
a field mouse
renting the thumb

 

This is the Prairie Zen economy.

Someone lost a glove. Its original purpose is over. To us it has become litter.

The mouse discovers available housing.

The humor matters because Prairie Zen isn't supposed to turn every encounter with nature into a solemn spiritual ceremony. Sometimes paying attention produces wisdom. Sometimes it produces a mouse living in somebody's glove.

The larger idea is still there: usefulness depends upon who's looking.

Human beings declared the glove useless.

The mouse filed different paperwork.

4.

soybean field—
the cellar hole
full of goldenrod

This is a particularly Midwestern kind of archaeology.

A cellar hole means there was once a house. Someone lived there. There were probably meals, arguments, winters, birthdays, repairs, bills, illnesses, mornings when somebody looked out the window and saw essentially the same land.

The house is gone.

Agriculture has absorbed the surrounding landscape, but the old foundation remains—and goldenrod has moved in.

Prairie Zen is deeply interested in places where different kinds of time overlap. Human history says: someone lived here.

The goldenrod says nothing.

It grows.

Neither cancels the other.

5.

field mowing—
the tractor
going around something

This may be the quietest poem of the five.

We aren't told what the tractor avoids.

A nest? A stone? Wildflowers? A fawn? A wet patch? Something the farmer remembers? Something we're not capable of guessing?

The absence of an explanation is the point.

For a moment, efficiency yields.

The straight line bends around something.

Prairie Zen lives in that bend.

It doesn't demand that human beings disappear from the landscape. The tractor belongs here too. So does agriculture. So does work. The interesting moment occurs when the person operating the machine recognizes that something else has a claim on the field.

We never learn what that something is.

We only see the accommodation.

Going Around Something

That final image may provide a useful way of understanding Prairie Zen itself.

We spend enormous portions of our lives trying to make the world travel in straight lines. We plan. Categorize. Improve. Remove obstacles. Repair cracks. Replace broken objects. Clear fields. Fill holes. Decide which things are useful and which things should be thrown away.

And the world keeps refusing to cooperate.

Oak trees fall.

Gloves disappear.

Houses vanish.

Birdbaths crack.

Something is in the field.

Prairie Zen isn't resignation. It isn't passivity, and it isn't an instruction to stop caring about what happens.

It's an acknowledgment that we are participants in a world containing innumerable other participants, most of whom have never heard our plans.

Sometimes wisdom is fixing what is broken.

Sometimes it's recognizing that the sparrows are already drinking from it.

And sometimes it's simply going around something.

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Rejected Titles and Other Things I Learned While Walking

Every book begins with a bad title.

Some books begin with twenty.

Mine usually begin with something that sounds profound until I have to imagine saying it out loud to another human being.

"What's your new book called?"

"Instructions for Becoming Moss."

"...Oh."

So, in the interest of public accountability, here are a few titles that have been rejected before they could embarrass either of us.

• How to Misplace a Soul in Northern Illinois
• Instructions for Becoming Moss
• The Prairie Doesn't Care
• Everything Eventually Becomes Dirt
• A Surprisingly Large Number of Crows
• Please Do Not Disturb the Ghosts
• The Department of Unimportant Discoveries
• Midwest Existentialism for Beginners
• Things I Was Pretty Sure Meant Something
• Probably Just a Stick

Some of these may yet have their day. Others deserve to remain quietly buried.

Walking is good for this sort of thing. Bad titles have a way of falling off somewhere around mile two.

It also teaches me things that are almost entirely useless.

Today's lessons:

• Crows notice you long before you notice them.
• Every cracked sidewalk eventually decides it would rather be a garden.
• The best mushrooms always seem to appear where no one was looking yesterday.
• If you stand still long enough, birds stop treating you like a problem.
• There is no such thing as "just another weed" if you spend enough time looking at it.
• You don't have to solve a day to have lived it well.

None of these observations have made me richer.

None have advanced my career.

None would impress a venture capitalist.

But they have made ordinary Tuesday mornings unexpectedly interesting, and that feels like a fair trade.

Besides, if Probably Just a Stick ever becomes the title of a book, you'll know exactly where it came from.

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The Prairie Zen School of Haiku of Thomas L. Vaultonburg

 The Prairie Zen School of Haiku

People often imagine Zen arriving from somewhere else. A mountain monastery. A bamboo grove. A stone garden where every pebble has been raked into perfect order. We inherit those images so completely that we forget the practice itself has never belonged to a landscape. It belongs to attention.

For more than thirty years I have been writing from a different landscape.

Not because I set out to invent anything new, but because I never had another place to stand.

My teachers have been red-winged blackbirds balancing on roadside cattails. Wind passing through abandoned farm fields. Hall Creek after spring rain. Snow drifting across forgotten county roads. Oaks that have watched generations of people arrive believing they were important and leave proving otherwise.

The prairie has always been enough.

Long before I ever thought of using the words Prairie Zen, the work had already begun. My earliest poems searched for moments that escaped notice. Later, my haiku abandoned explanation almost entirely. Instead of telling readers what to think, I learned to trust what remained after language became quiet.

A dead leaf blowing into my mouth while trying to speak the truth.

An old dog faithfully guarding nothing.

A bare tree still capable of holding the sky.

These are not symbols to decode. They are complete experiences. The prairie has no interest in becoming metaphor simply because a writer arrived carrying one.

That understanding did not come from philosophy alone. It came from years of walking. Through Rockford parks and railroad margins. Along river trails. Through restored prairie and oak savanna. Through Severson Dells, where glaciers, dolomite, Hall Creek, birds, fungi, prairie grass and deep geological time quietly refuse to separate themselves into subjects. They exist together because the world exists together.

The prairie teaches scale.

Stand in tall grass and you discover you are neither insignificant nor central. You are simply present.

That may be the most difficult lesson modern life offers.

Our culture rewards performance. The prairie rewards observation. Our devices demand reaction. The prairie asks only that you notice. Every season strips away another unnecessary layer until attention itself becomes enough.

I have watched this happen in my own work. Books like Small Songs for Weary Travelers and Vanished Roads were never attempts to imitate Japanese aesthetics. They were attempts to discover what contemplation sounds like when spoken with a Midwestern accent. They belong to gravel roads instead of temple paths, grain elevators instead of pagodas, meadowlarks instead of cranes.

That does not make them less Zen.

It makes them honestly rooted.

Prairie Zen is not a school. It has no robes, no membership, no doctrine waiting to be defended. It is simply the realization that awakening is no less available beside a rusted fencepost than beneath a cherry tree.

The prairie does not ask us to become someone else before it reveals itself.

It only asks us to look.

For decades, that has been the work.

Everything else has merely been writing it down.

Illustration from Vanished Roads by Tré

See the Prairie Zen of Thomas L. Vaultonburg in his latest book of haiku Vanished Roads

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Magedah Shabo Reviews Vanished Roads by Thomas L. Vaultonburg

Buy Vanished Roads

I recently had the pleasure of reading a review copy of Vanished Roads, a newly released haiku collection by Thomas L. Vaultonburg from Zombie Logic Press.

Having already encountered many of the haiku individually, I was fascinated by the interpretive depth and thematic unity that could emerge from rereading them as a body of work.

In Vanished Roads, loss and grief are less like endings and more like thresholds to discovery. In the poems' world, boundaries between the ordinary and the numinous, the human and the more-than-human world are never cleanly drawn.

This porosity is evident in many of the author's most memorable haiku turns, which tend to shift the reader's perspective in ways that feel dreamlike, yet natural and inevitable.

after she paints 
even the brush water

holds a sky

Tré's cover art gently brings the collection's themes into focus, sharing the poems' delight in multiple ways of seeing.

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.

-Magedah Shabo

Read Sean Wright's review of Vanished roads at Zombie Logic Review

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