I Made Dumb Things Today and Now I'm Going To Watch Vault of Horror and Drink a Final Cup of Tea

I made dumb things today and now I'm going to celebrate the dumb things I made by showing them to you and drinking a final cup of tea while I watch Vault of Horror. Then I'm going to go to Outsider Poetry and write a posy titled Outlaw Poetry emanates from Yul Brynner's crotch. 

The man in the first story of Vault of Horror has just been served a glass of blood he believes to be tomato juice after traveling to a remote village of vampires to kill his sister after their father dies. She returns to the restaurant later to partake of a glass of his blood after he is tapped like a beer barrel. One of the vampires says "A good year," which seems kind of funny. 

Gap-toothed British funnyman Terry-Thomas stars in the second story as a domineering jackass who bullies his wife until she buries a clawhammer in his skull and stores his parts meticulously in jars in the basement. Both stories I have described are far more tongue in cheek than gruesome, although when described they sound bloody and violent.

I see on the other screen, a television, i am also watching The Omega Man. I have a similar living arrangement to The Omega Man in that I live in an apartment above the third most dangerous neighborhood in America. Last night there were high speed polic chases and an ambulance showed up another time to cart someone away that was sitting on the bus stop bench under my window. 

Today in the mail I received Super Mario Kart, but I haven't gotten the generic clone game system I ordered so i can play it with Jack. 

The days are so fast I can't possibly apprehend them or even make a concentrated effort to describe what is happening. For him these days are going slowly because in the Psychology of Perception i learned youth seems very long and eventful because time to us is really the space between novel experiences. I can't wait for her to bury that claw hammer in this jerk's head so we can get to the Dr. Who story.

I left the design components I alluded to in the title on the other computer, the one I am watching Vault of Horror on. 

Did you see that Cubs game tonight? They are 8-1 now. When they resigned Dexter Fowler a couple of weeks before Spring Training I didn't think much of it because he didn't exactly blow the roof off my doors last season, but he's off to a roaring start, and with the Kyle Schwarber injury his return seems like a genius move. 

We reloaded the book of Outlaw Poetry we've been editing, The Blood Dark Sea, onto the BookMobile preflight apparatus, and if we approve the changes we made tomorrow I hear it could arrive by April 22nd. Actually, that is kind of a gruesome ending with the hammer and the body parts, but it's all in good fun.

Terry-Thomas really earned every ounce of this fate

I forgot the magic rope story comes before the Tom Baker story. It's a good one, too, and a cautionary tale not to "appropriate" the work of others. 

So, let me recap: time flies, Cubs, Omega Man, Dr. Who, Yul Brynner's crotch, goodnight

2026 Update..... ten years later, and pretty much what I still do with my life. I make dumb things and watch bad horror movies. 

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National Poetry Month Day 10: The Next Generation

Jenny uploaded the files of our latest Zombie Logic Press book, The Blood Dark Sea, to the printers database Friday afternoon, so it seems like barring any unforseen issues we'll be going to print next week. This will be the third book of someone else's I will have published. This book differs from my own poetry, and the other two I've published in that it is more of an Outlaw Poetry book. It's a genre I'm certainly familiar with, having come along during the last days of the small press revolution, where almost everyone wrote in a style vaguely imitative of Charles Bukowski, but what sets this book apart is the humor. I think it's going to turn out great. 

Will I ever finish another book of my own poetry? I have no idea. Google says these shorter blog posts are killing my search rankings. I need to find ways to get to 400 words. 

I could talk about Star Trek: The Next Generation on BBC America on Saturday night. It just started. Looks like a young Riker, so I'm guessing one of the earlier seasons.

Back to National Poetry Month. Oh, now Commander Data is sitting in the captain's chair. Wesley Crusher. He was one of the successful early celebrity bloggers. He also writes a lot about mental health issues. As do I. I am not, however, a successful early celebrity blogger. It has been quite a struggle. I have written for years about poetry, horror movies, politics, sports, and dozens of other issues, but nothing ever seems to find a larger audience. I now use my blog more of an extension of my memory as much as a device to communicate with others or reach a wider audience. 

All this cyber space is free. I suppose for a couple of weeks I should concentrate on writing longer, more focused pieces and see how Google likes that. I was right, season 2, episode 8. Riker is exchanged for a Clingon and things get testy between the Enterprise and the Clingon vessel. 

We went to Arby's for date night on Wednesday and I ordered a vanilla shake, then was slightly disappointed when I saw they had a mint shake available. I did enjoy my angus sandwich. They have the meats. 

The Cubs have started the season 4-1. I personally believed they should have traded Kyle Scwarber during the off season because he belongs in the American League. I think they will find a way to win without him, but what a disappointment to get hurt in the third game of the season. 

Miles O'Brien. A lot of early characters I remember but haven't seen in a long time. 

I don't think I'll ever get a Vista Cruiser Pin It

More Late Night Notes From an Outsider Poet

Time for one last Rockford Files tonight, which may put the cap on season number one, which I have watched in one week. 

On Friday there is a Charles Bukowski reading here in Rockford, and I think I might read. The format is that one reads their favorite Bukowski poem, followed a poem of their own. I did some recordings earlier in the week and posted them on SoundCloud. 

Also today I finished the team page for the Rockford Pages outsider poetry slam team. Looks like it has decided to snow after all outside. Doesn't make much difference to me, I have nothing scheduled this week until Friday. Just watching Rockford Files, hanging out with the kids, and creating team pages for Yakima, Walla Walla, Crested Butte, Hell, and Buttzville. 

Jim Rockford is in Las Vegas. Driving a lime green VW bug. And he got hit over the head.  Pin It

I Wonder What Skullduggery Ross Martin Is Up To Tonight

Did Ross Martin ever not play a bad guy after The Wild, Wild West? I guess he just has one of those faces. He's on McCloud tonight, and although he hasn't done anything nefarious yet, I'm convinced that he will. And get caught at the end.

I think I saw him a few weeks ago on Banicek, trying to match wits with Banicek and generally being an arrogant jerk. 

Ross Martin on The Twilight Zone

Anyway, I want to talk about this apple I'm eating. I needed to buy some for the kids at the supermarket over the weekend, and I know they know make apples with actual flavor after decades of red delicious apples that tasted like eating cardboard. The closer I got to the apples the more people swooped in and seemed intent on not moving. Normally when people do this I just go look at something else, but this time I really just wanted to get in there and get some tasty apples and get moving on, so I hung in there. I saw one bag that said Pacific roses, and that sounded tasty, so I grabbed a bag. I'm trying one tonight for the first time, and it's not that great. After a lifetime of expecting apples to taste like pulp I now really get excited about biting into one, but these are very lackluster. 

No moon again tonight. Too much cloud cover, which is a shame because this cleansing snow moon, as I have heard it called, has been fun to look at. I could see it if I went up to bed. It was really bright last night, but I'd like to see it outside the window as I work downstairs and wait for Ross Martin to unveil whatever villainous plan he's about to hatch.

Maybe Ross Martin will reveal he's from Saturn at the end of tonight's McCloud episode

I was writing earlier about the difference between outsider and outlaw poetry, but only just earlier I had a feeling I might be near the end of this jag I'm on. 

I wonder how long McCloud was in New York City in the span of the television series, and if the police chief was threatening to send him back to New Mexico in every episode. 

Maybe I will go upstairs to bed and look at the moon from there and listen to the radio with my earphones. 

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Noir Outlaw Poetry From Zombie Logic Press

Mostly I'm comfortable publishing Outsider Poetry, Surrealism, and Dada at Zombie Logic Press and Zombie Logic Review because I have what i think is an innate grasp of those styles, but the next book from Zombie Logic Press, which is now imminent, The Blood Dark Sea, is a marvelous book of Outlaw Poetry in the movie noir style. It was written by Rockford poet Dennis Gulling, a writer I have known a long time and respect very much. I'm proud to own the press that will be making the first full-length collection of this mostly unknown writer available to the world. I say mostly unknown because Dennis Gulling is mysterious, even to me. I know we both published in the small presses in the late 80's and early 90's. I know we did poetry readings together at Cafe Esperanto and other places in Rockford, and I know he is thought of by many in the know, including Mas Tequila editor Richard Vargas, and co-founder of the Outlaw Poetry movement and his mentor Todd Moore, as the region's finest poet. The poems in Blood Dark Sea will bear this high praise out. 

Just this week I got a quote for the first press run of the book, and I think if I have the energy and don't encounter any setbacks with my ongoing dental work I may have it ready for the printer as early as late next week. I can't resist just laying down a little taste here as a teaser, but also to motivate me because I know it's time for people to see this book. This is an example of the crime noir Outlaw Poetry I'm talking about.

VEGAS

The ring on her finger
Felt like a noose around her neck
So she threw everything she had
Into 3 garbage bags
While he was at work
And stuffed them into the trunk
Of her ‘78 Bonneville
Took the $200 he had in a roll
In the back of his underwear drawer
Along with the .22 automatic
He never bothered to register
She drove the 96 miles to Vegas
To work the $200 into something solid
Sold the gun for $20
At a gas station along the way
To some fat guy in a pickup truck
Loaded with old barbed wire and rusty pipes
When she hit the Golden Nugget
She didn’t even stop to check in
Turned the whole bankroll into chips
And made a beeline for the blackjack table
Walked away about an hour later
With $30 and a lump in her stomach
As hard as her luck
Didn’t have anywhere else to go
But back home
He didn’t say anything 
When she walked through the door
He didn’t have to
She went into the bedroom
Curled up on the bed
And stared a hole in the wall

Artwork from The Blood Dark Sea by Jenny Mathews

     What amazes me about the poems in this book is how elegantly they delve into some really dark subject matter, but are never once prurient, or mean-spirited. There's humanity to these observations of people in some pretty awful situations. But there's also a sense of humor and no judgement. These things happen. The Blood Dark Sea is the kind of book where you can be glad they are happening to someone else, and a poet with a keen eye and flair for the subject matter is there to report back, so to speak. 

I hope you'll check back in a few weeks when it is available. Pin It

Johnny Carson Shows and Outlaw Poetry Books

Dental work again later today. But for now watching Johnny Carson from 1992, two weeks before the final show. To my sadness I see MeTV has apparently changed their overnight schedule from Night Gallery, Hitchcock, and Thriller to Rockford Files, Kojak, and McCloud. It wasn't a mere overrun from a hockey game last night that led to McCloud playing until 4 a.m. Having a final cup of tea and thinking about maybe going to bed early tonight, if 2 a.m. is early.

Short detour to the emergency room tonight but everyone seems to alright. Time flies. Watching a stage hand try to hit Johnny Carson in the face with a pie and missing I remember the time I was charged with the task of hitting Tim Stotz in the face with a towel from off set on This Is Our City. 

This is mostly a free write and there's no good reason for anyone to read it. I had to spend an extra five dollars at the post office today to send a package Priority Mail because I didn't get there yesterday and I don't want the customer to give me a bad rating. The book I sent was The Encyclopedia of Monsters. It's a nice reference book, but I just saw it on the shelf and didn't have much use for it. I have to get a few more items listed on Ebay.

In better news my insurance gives me a free one year membership to the YMCA, and we happen to have one of the better YMCAs in America here, so I'm looking forward to getting back in the gym.

I just need one more good push and I can get this next book edited and sent to the printer. The Outsider Poetry Slam League I created over the past two nights seems far less amusing to me tonight, but it was fun at the time. 

I watched the sequel to Night of Horror, Curse of the Cannibal Confederates last night, sort of. I think the director was pretty much only interested in the Civil War re-enactment phase of shooting, which is ironic because they got the uniforms wrong. I bet he knew that but just didn't have the money to do anything about it. Still I think he might have found some way to conceal the glaring error in the uniforms. 

Outsider Poet Thomas L. Vaultonburg (me) with a copy of Crad Kilodney's small press classic The Humour of Crad Kilodney that he received from Jenny Mathews the artist on his 47th birthday

Gary Shandling bombing on his last Carson appearance. But confides in Johnny he just shot the first episode of the Larry Sanders Show the previous day. Hey now. There he got a good joke in. Maybe he'll save the appearance with a good flourish at the end.  Pin It

Interview With Not Outlaw Poet Thomas L. Vaultonburg

Zombie Logic recently interviewed Outlaw poet Thomas L. Vaultonburg, author of four books of poetry, including Flesh Wounds, a book of poetry he wrote during the ten years he worked as a bartender and bouncer in strip clubs and dive bars. 

Zombie: You don't consider yourself an Outlaw poet, but the poems in Flesh Wounds are a literal document of someone not obeying many rules at all, in terms of society or poetry. 

Vaultonburg: Not intentionally. I tend to be rather conservative in my personal attitudes towards morality. Working in strip clubs and seedy bars was less of a choice than an accident. I took the work that was offered and went where it led me. Most nights I wanted to scrub my skin with steel wool to try and wash off the sleeze and filth. A lot of people have romantic notions about places like strip clubs, but its a sick, sad, dispiriting place where you never want to find yourself after they turn off the stage lights. 

Zombie: Thus the title of your third book of poetry, Flesh Wounds?

Vaultonburg: Exactly. You're always aware of the fact when you work in the bar business that almost nothing you are doing has any redeeming value at all, and in fact you're probably contributing to a great amount of suffering and dysfunction. 

Zombie Logic: You saw some strange things in your days as a bouncer. How did that inform your work?

Vaultonburg: I saw everything. I was invited to try everything. 99% of the time I went home and watched television instead. Sin is more boring than most people fantasize about.

Zombie: Doesn't sound like the Outlaw poetry I'm aware of where pot-bellied writers who work in safe occupations write frothy poems about strip clubs and being bad-asses?

Vaultonburg: That's not the reality of it. I saw those guys in the club. Normally they were English teachers or professors who came to see 18 year old girls who had become strippers that they probably had been fantasizing about since they had them is Sophomore English. Their jobs and families and lives were really safe and measured out, so they came to the strip club, then went home and wrote poems romanticizing a lot of stuff that never happened. Not to them, at least. 

Zombie: But you don't consider yourself an Outlaw?

Vaultonburg: No. I did meet and have to interact with some very successful Outlaws and out-an-out criminals during those years, and they'd be the last ones to self-identify themselves as Outlaws. In general they would do anything they could not to draw attention to themselves. 

Zombie: There's a lot of tough material in your book Flesh Wounds.

Vaultonburg: Those things happened. If I had been a member of the Mormon Tabernacle Choir I would have written about that. 

Zombie: You designed the cover of Flesh Wounds from a painting of Doubting Thomas by Caravaggio. Are you experiencing a religious conversion?

Vaultonburg: No. As you can see I have a Schlitz firmly in hand. I have no plans to join anyone's team anytime soon. 

Purchase Flesh Wounds

Zombie: Your favorite poems in Flesh Wounds aren't the ones about sins of the flesh and what you witnessed in those years in the service industry. A poem like "Pinata." Why is that? 

Vaultonburg: Those are better poems. I also like the poems like "Dancing With a Beetle" where I was able to seperate myself from the conditions I was living in and speculate what the world might be like if I were ever to re-enter it. 



Pinata 

You were our first lesson 
 In rage and greed- 
 Possibly love. 
 Our smiling guardian 
 Put the stick 
 In our small hands, 
 Blindfolded us 
 And whispered that 
 Unspeakable treasures 
 Awaited us when we 
 Destroyed you. 
 Spun around and 
 Drunken with images 
 Of unimaginable trinkets 
 We became whirling dervishes 
 Of lust and anger, 
 Whacking and thumping away 
 At your broken smile 
 Way past nap time, 
 Until frustrated with 
 Our lack of killer instinct, 
 Our teacher sawed you 
 In half, spilling 
 Far less enticing bounty 
 Than we had dreamed of. Some rushed forward and 
 Grabbed and devoured, 
 Others stood back and 
 Cried over the carnage. 
 Either way we all learned 
 Who we would be that day. 

Zombie: You were kind of a bad-ass. Those were some rough clubs you bounced in. 

Vaultonburg: I still am. 

Zombie: Ever miss it?

Vaultonburg: Anyone who has ever worked in a busy bar would know I was a liar if I said I didn't miss it sometimes. The variety, not ever knowing what to expect, seeing people at their worst and getting to go home with a wad of cash.

Zombie: And poems to boot. 

Vaultonburg: I got paid for ten years to do all the things other people only talk about.

Zombie: But you're not an Outlaw?

Vaultonburg: Nope. 
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Outsiders, Outlaws, and Then There's Me

I've decided to call myself an Outlaw Poet this week. Last week I was a Zombie Poet. Next week I'm considering being an Outsider Poet. I'm not really any of those things, or aligned with any of those movements in any significant way, but I just feel like I need some movement to help me define my work and who I am.

The Outsider movement seems good because if I decide it's not for me, I can leave and still be in the movement. The Outlaw movement is slightly more problematic because, as Bob Dylan wrote, "To live outside the law you have to be honest," and I ain't falling for that shit.

I guess I just need help defining myself.

When I first started publishing poetry in the late '80s, it was the height—but the unforeseen beginning of the end—of the Small Press movement, defined by journals like The Wormwood Review and poets like Charles Bukowski and Lyn Lifshin. Thousands of small zines published a rogues' gallery of poets who wrote about bad behavior, freedom, and trying to survive as poets outside the universities and without the grants the academic circle jerkers distributed among themselves.

It really was a fun and golden time for the poetry scene, and one I was immersed in from a very young age, learning my first lessons from poets like Todd Moore, Ron Androla, Kurt Nimmo, and Gerald Locklin. Even the immortal Charles Bukowski seemed to break his own rules and return encouraging letters to me without calling me a talentless punk.

That era ended with the internet.

What needs to be understood is that before the internet, it often took months, even a year, to collect submissions for a literary review, make editorial decisions, print it, and send it out to everyone who was in it. Now this can be done almost instantaneously, which takes a lot of the sacred nature out of the process.

You used to wait, and wait, and wait, and when that zine finally arrived in the mail, you looked to see who else was in it. You knew them because you knew they went through the same process you did, and you savored the whole thing from cover to cover. The internet has made this process too accessible, too easy, and therefore disposable.

Many of those poets from the golden age of the small presses are gone, like Todd Moore, the first Outlaw Poet. Many simply gave up trying to reach an audience and went back to lives outside the universities and MFA programs. Many have dispersed into the Outsider and Outlaw movements, and some have learned how to use the internet to boost themselves into the public consciousness.

It's always sad to come in at the end of an era. To be the last generation of anything.

There's nothing like the printed word. There's nothing like the smell of paper and that unmistakable scent of a fresh Kinko's copy. There's nothing like waiting to improve one's discipline. And there's nothing like sharing a common love to create fellowship.

That's what's gone, for the most part: the fellowship.

In February, the numbers told me more people read my work on the internet than in the entirety of the words I have printed on pages. But just knowing someone is holding your book in their hands creates a bond the cyber world will never duplicate.

I still haven't found the movement that's right for me. I've jokingly created movements that include just myself, like Reductionism, but even I got bored at the meetings. I just don't think I'm going to be welcomed into anyone else's camp anytime soon.

I have resigned myself to going on alone.

By the way, thanks for coming. Here's a poem.

I'm going to post this one for the first time. I think I was reading Dorothy Parker at the time I wrote it, and it represents a growing desire to incorporate some sort of form into my poetry. At least as an experiment.

It's Hell

It's Hell you say
As you assay
With a pro's cache
The chemicals we
Have procured to allay
The night's malaise

It's Hell you attest
But without the interesting
Party guests
The assassins
The buggerers
And the incest

It's Hell I agree
This eternal thrashing
In the scree
And watching you slither
Twixt debauches
Tailored more to you
Than me

August 2026 update: I guess all this time later I can tell you what I really think. All those poets who identified themselves as Outlaw Poets always struck me as the losers you'd see at the end of the bar who got nothing to say until they get home, then they weave these tall tales about how they're badasses and outlaws whereas if they ever did pipe up in public they'd like just get their ass whooped. The Outlaw Bible of American Poetry is an anthology chock full of losers, pretenders, and posers who write at best mediocre poetry. 

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