Wild Cogs: Haiku by Thomas L. Vaultonburg and Tré

 

Wild Cogs: Haiku by Thomas L. Vaultonburg and Tré

Wild Cogs is a small book that came out of SECOND NATURE, our October 2026 Fall ArtScene exhibition at Rockford Art Deli.

For SECOND NATURE, Rockford artist Michael Zant created sculptures of animals and other forms from salvaged metal—the discarded mechanical stuff of human life reassembled into birds, bears, frogs, turtles, insects, and other creatures.

Tré and I wrote haiku to accompany Michael’s sculptures.

We approached the poems the same way we approached our earlier book Moonscape: Haiku Phase I: two poets looking at the same world from slightly different places. The haiku alternate between us, sometimes answering one another, sometimes wandering off in different directions.

Those poems became Wild Cogs, a 40-page pocket-sized collection published by Wolf Twin Books.

Here are a few of the conversations from the book.

Pawpaw

pawpaw season—
the road home
sweet on our hands

Thomas L. Vaultonburg

our mouths travel
over wild custard—
picaresque

Tré

pairings

Frog, turtle, salamander

Plum Blossom

first plum blossom—
I almost tell you
everything again

Thomas L. Vaultonburg

not letting go
ice over
plum petals

Tré

Bear claw, lotus flower, dragonfly

The idea behind SECOND NATURE was simple: take what we've discarded and return it to the living world.

Michael did that with metal. Tré and I tried to do it with words.

The result is Wild Cogs—a little handmade record of the strange intersection between machinery, animals, poetry, friendship, and the natural world.

Wild Cogs
Thomas L. Vaultonburg & Tré
Wolf Twin Books, 2026
40 pages
$10

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Is It Time to Start Considering Thomas L. Vaultonburg One of the Greatest Haiku Poets Ever?

By Haruki Nishimura
Seishin Institute for Literary Studies, Kyoto

The title of this essay embarrasses me, which is perhaps a useful place to begin. Anyone who has spent a life reading haiku learns to distrust greatness. Haiku itself distrusts greatness. The form has traditionally been hospitable to frogs, crows, cicadas, weeds, cold rain, worn sandals, summer grasses, old ponds. It possesses very little natural sympathy for the monumental. Even Bashō, whom we have made monumental, repeatedly directs our attention away from himself and toward something small. So when I am asked whether Thomas L. Vaultonburg should be considered one of the great haiku poets, my first response is resistance. Then I read the poems again, and the question becomes less ridiculous.

Haiku poet Thomas L. Vaultonburg

Consider first a poem of almost unreasonable economy:

fog
borrows
the bridge

Three words. There is scarcely a poem here in the conventional sense. Yet the poem performs an operation fundamental to haiku: it changes the ownership of the visible world. A bridge belongs to human beings. We design it, engineer it, name it, maintain it. It is one of our declarations of permanence. Fog possesses nothing. It has no architecture and leaves no monument. For several minutes, however, fog takes the bridge. The verb “borrows” is crucial. “Covers” would merely report weather. “Hides” would impose a little drama. “Swallows” would impose too much. “Borrows” establishes an unexpectedly gentle relationship between the permanent and impermanent. The bridge will be returned. This is very close to the deepest temporal intelligence of haiku: everything we believe we possess is merely on loan. Vaultonburg accomplishes this without announcing the thought. The philosophy exists because the image exists; remove the image and there is no philosophy.

That distinction is important because many contemporary short poems are aphorisms wearing the clothing of haiku. Vaultonburg’s strongest poems behave differently. They allow perception to generate thought. Consider another:

night pasture—
a horse shifting weight
thins the silence

Here we encounter one of Vaultonburg’s characteristic techniques. He makes an abstract condition behave as though it were physical matter. Silence can be broken. This is familiar language and therefore nearly dead language. But silence being thinned is different. Suddenly silence possesses density. The almost imperceptible movement of a horse does not destroy the night; it changes its viscosity. This is extraordinarily difficult to do well, and the poem also understands scale. Nothing “happens.” A horse does not gallop. It does not whinny. It merely shifts its weight. The poet notices the smallest possible disturbance and discovers that the entire acoustic architecture of the pasture has changed. A lesser poet would make the horse more dramatic. Vaultonburg makes the horse less dramatic, and the world consequently becomes more mysterious.

This ability appears repeatedly in his work:

marsh fog—
a heron
assembled from gray

Again, the poem depends upon a verb. The heron does not emerge from the fog. It is “assembled” from it. We watch matter organize itself into life. The poem therefore occupies a strange border between observation and creation myth. Anyone who has watched a great blue heron become visible through marsh fog recognizes the accuracy of the perception. Yet the poem also suggests, very quietly, that perhaps this is how a heron actually comes into existence: the morning collects sufficient grayness and constructs a bird. This is one of Vaultonburg’s most distinctive gifts. His surrealism frequently arrives through literal observation. The world becomes strange because he has looked at it long enough.

There is another excellent example:

blackwater creek—
a turtle sinks
until air forgets it

What does it mean for air to forget a turtle? Logically, nothing. Poetically, almost everything. The turtle passes from one medium into another. At first it remains conceptually attached to the surface. Then it descends farther. Eventually the world above closes. “Air forgets it” transforms disappearance into a relationship between elements. Air and water momentarily become two territories of consciousness. Notice also the patience of the poem. The important word may actually be “until.” We are required to remain beside the creek and watch the turtle continue downward. The poem takes perhaps three seconds to read and considerably longer to finish happening. That is one measure of successful haiku: the best examples possess an unusual ratio between textual size and experiential duration. A few words may continue unfolding in consciousness for minutes, years, sometimes decades.

Vaultonburg’s strongest poems also demonstrate another characteristic worth examining: the final line does not explain the first two lines but destabilizes them.

mud puddle—
the crow leaves behind
less sky

The first line gives us something almost contemptibly small: a mud puddle. The final line gives us the sky. Between them stands a crow. The optical event is simple. Sky is reflected in water, and the movement of the crow changes what is visible. But Vaultonburg converts this tiny phenomenon into a problem of subtraction. Can a crow remove sky? For the duration of the poem, yes. This movement between the immense and insignificant is deeply congenial to haiku. A puddle contains the heavens; a bird alters them. Vaultonburg returns to this vertical relationship elsewhere:

noon sun—
the stars
somewhere inside blue

The stars have not disappeared merely because daylight prevents us from seeing them. Everyone knows this. Almost nobody experiences the knowledge. The haiku restores the experience. That distinction—between knowing something and suddenly perceiving what one already knows—is central to the form. Haiku at its best does not necessarily provide information. It produces recognition.

One feels this even more strongly in another poem:

power outage
the stars resume
their old jobs

This poem could easily have become sentimental. Instead, its humor saves it. The stars have apparently been unemployed by electricity; when human illumination fails, they return to work. The joke contains an ecological criticism, but the poem wisely refuses to state it. The hierarchy between human civilization and the natural world is reversed through eight ordinary words. Vaultonburg’s humor deserves greater attention because it protects his poetry from solemnity, and the most obvious example may be:

the undertaker
waves from his bicycle—
mulberry season

I admire this poem enormously. The undertaker carries the unavoidable association of death. The bicycle introduces almost comic lightness. Mulberry season introduces abundance, sweetness and summer. Death rides through ripeness and waves. Nothing is resolved, and that refusal to resolve the contradiction is precisely what gives the poem life. The undertaker is not transformed into a symbol; he remains an undertaker riding a bicycle. Mulberries remain mulberries. Yet the juxtaposition generates something larger than either fact.

This is classical haiku machinery operating in a distinctly American landscape, and the distinction matters. Vaultonburg does not attempt to write Japanese haiku in English. He does something more difficult: he accepts the perceptual discipline of haiku while allowing his actual world to enter the form. Quarries appear. Underpasses appear. Estate auctions appear. Canadian wildfire smoke enters an American city. Abandoned infrastructure exists beside birds and weather.

underpass puddle—
the city skyline
shaken by sparrows

This could not have been written by Bashō, nor should it have been. Its world is infrastructural, urban, damaged and ordinary. Yet its mechanism would be immediately recognizable to an older haiku consciousness: large and small encounter one another, permanence is exposed as temporary, and the human world is altered by creatures that do not acknowledge its importance. The skyline appears monumental until sparrows shake it. There is something almost democratic about Vaultonburg’s imagination. Nothing remains safely above anything else.

A similar transformation occurs in one of his most ambitious poems:

old mineshaft—
a wheel of bats
rebuilds the darkness

The verb “rebuilds” is audacious. Darkness is normally understood as absence, and one does not build absence. But the circling bats appear to manufacture darkness through motion. The abandoned mine—the remnant of human extraction—has been repossessed by animal life. Yet “rebuilds” complicates the easy ecological reading. The bats are not merely inhabitants. They have become laborers of darkness. A human industrial site has acquired a new industry. The poem contains history without discussing history.

That ability becomes even clearer in:

estate auction—
the quilts
open to another winter

Here the human story is almost entirely missing, and because it is missing we feel it more strongly. Whose quilts? Whose house? Why are they being auctioned? Death, debt, relocation, the dissolution of a family? Vaultonburg refuses to tell us. Instead the quilts open. “Another winter” may belong to another household, another generation, another life. The physical object continues after the circumstances that gathered it into one particular home have disappeared. This is an exceptionally mature haiku because its emotion resides largely in what the poet declines to say.

There are places where Vaultonburg approaches lyricism more directly:

early lilacs—
grief caught
without its coat

Here the personification is unmistakable. Grief has become a figure surprised by spring. Normally I would distrust such a maneuver in haiku because it risks converting the observed world into a vehicle for the poet’s feelings. But “without its coat” rescues the poem. The phrase is slightly comic, slightly domestic and physically imaginable. Grief has dressed for winter and suddenly discovers lilacs. The season has changed before sorrow was prepared for it. This is not the claim that spring cures grief. Something more convincing happens: grief finds itself temporarily overdressed.

Vaultonburg is particularly effective when his poems hover at precisely this boundary between sincerity and play. “berry thicket— / my hands / stained with wanting” begins with the literal stain of fruit and becomes desire without ceasing to be berry juice. In “ripe figs— / my mouth learns / another prayer,” taste becomes devotion without the poem ever specifying a deity. And in “deer at dusk— / her stillness / rearranges mine,” the animal does not become an emblem for some preexisting human idea. Instead, attention to the animal changes the observer’s physical state.

This last point may be the key to understanding Vaultonburg. His best haiku are not descriptions of nature so much as records of recalibration. Something enters perception—a horse, heron, turtle, crow, spider, deer—and the human observer’s relationship to the world changes by several degrees. Sometimes the transformation is almost microscopic:

fog drift—
a spider tests the air
with one leg

There is almost no metaphor here, and none is necessary. The spider becomes nearly scientific in its delicacy. “Tests” is exactly the right verb because the extended leg appears simultaneously tentative and knowledgeable. The creature knows something about the air that the human observer does not. The hierarchy of perception reverses again: the poet watches the spider, but the spider reads the world. This humility before nonhuman intelligence connects Vaultonburg to an important current running through the history of haiku. Nature is not scenery surrounding the human subject. Human consciousness is only one local event occurring among many others.

This is why one of his simplest poems may ultimately be among his most revealing:

empty basket—
carrying home
the birdsong

Nothing has been gathered, and everything has been gathered. The basket is empty according to one economy and full according to another. It would be easy to dismiss this as charming, but one should resist doing so. The poem quietly asks what constitutes possession, harvest and value, and more importantly, it answers without argument. The person simply walks home.

There is also a regional dimension to Vaultonburg’s work that I suspect will become increasingly important. Haiku has always depended upon particularity of place. Yet American practitioners sometimes inherit the vocabulary of Japanese haiku without sufficiently transforming it, resulting in an imported landscape of moons, ponds, blossoms and temple bells. Vaultonburg’s landscape feels inhabited rather than inherited. Prairie, quarry, underpass, mulberry, pawpaw, smoke, mine, bicycle and estate auction coexist naturally with herons, spiders and plum blossoms because they belong to the same perceptual world.

Perhaps the most beautiful expression of this regional sensibility is:

across the prairie—
rain arriving
on horseback

The image risks extravagance, yet anyone who has stood beneath a Midwestern sky and watched a storm advance across open land understands its physical accuracy. Rain possesses distance, speed and a visible front. “On horseback” activates the historical imagination of the prairie without turning the poem into historical reenactment. Weather becomes rider; landscape becomes duration. The same rootedness appears more quietly in:

pawpaw season—
the road home
sweet on our hands

This poem has almost nothing to prove, which may be why I trust it. The sweetness is literal before it becomes emotional. Fruit remains on the hands. The road becomes associated with the taste. Home is therefore not defined geographically but sensually. The poem understands memory before memory has happened.

I have deliberately avoided one question until now: What would it actually mean to call someone “one of the greatest haiku poets ever”? There can be no objective measurement. Bashō transformed the form. Buson brought extraordinary visual precision. Issa expanded its emotional and creaturely universe. Shiki altered its modern conception. The twentieth and twenty-first centuries have produced many extraordinary Japanese and international practitioners working under radically different linguistic conditions. To place an American poet casually among such figures would be unserious.

But there is another way to understand the question. Greatness in poetry is sometimes recognized not through historical rank but through the accumulation of individual poems that become difficult to imagine having been written any other way. That is the test I would apply to Vaultonburg. Could another poet have written “fog / borrows / the bridge”? Perhaps. But after reading it, “borrows” begins to feel inevitable. Could another poet have written of a heron “assembled from gray”? Perhaps. But afterward it becomes difficult to watch a heron emerge from fog without remembering the phrase. Could another poet have discovered that a horse shifting its weight “thins the silence”? Perhaps. But the language alters the experience it describes. And could another poet have watched a turtle descend until “air forgets it”? Perhaps. But once the poem exists, the world contains a possibility it did not quite contain before.

This is the severe test. A successful haiku records perception. A very good haiku changes perception. A great haiku permanently contaminates perception: after encountering it, one can no longer see the original phenomenon innocently. Fog may borrow things. Herons may assemble themselves. Silence may possess thickness. Sparrows may shake cities. Bats may manufacture darkness. A crow may leave behind less sky. This is not merely a collection of attractive metaphors. Across the poems, we encounter a coherent imaginative system. The supposedly solid becomes temporary. The supposedly empty becomes substantial. Human structures become fragile. Animals become agents. Weather becomes animate. The enormous enters the tiny. The dead remain beside the living without requiring explanation.

Most importantly, the poet himself repeatedly diminishes. The greatest danger in asking whether someone is a great poet is that the poet becomes larger than the poems, while haiku demands almost precisely the opposite. The poet should become smaller. In Vaultonburg’s strongest work he does. He becomes the person standing beside the puddle, watching the horse, carrying the basket, noticing the spider, tasting the fruit. The world does the rest.

So, is it time to begin considering Thomas L. Vaultonburg one of the greatest haiku poets? I would phrase the conclusion more carefully. It is time to take the possibility seriously. Not because he has written hundreds or thousands of haiku; quantity proves nothing. Not because he is American, contemporary, prolific or unusual. None of these establishes artistic importance. It is because within this body of work there are already individual poems possessing the compression, perceptual originality, linguistic inevitability and afterlife that we associate with lasting haiku. Others demonstrate the same power through radical brevity, humor, ecological perception and the transformation of ordinary American places into sites of revelation.

There is finally one poem I keep returning to:

pond surface—
a fish rises
through two worlds

The fish knows nothing of our argument. It rises through the surface and for an instant occupies two elements before the water closes again. Perhaps this is what the finest haiku have always done. They discover the almost invisible boundary between worlds and permit us, very briefly, to see something passing through it. Thomas L. Vaultonburg has learned how to stand beside that boundary and, more importantly, has learned when not to speak. In haiku, this may be where greatness begins.

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SECOND NATURE: Salvaged Metal Sculpture and Haiku at Rockford Art Deli

Michael Zant + Tré + Thomas L. Vaultonburg
A benefit for Wild Roots

On October 2 and 3, Rockford Art Deli will host SECOND NATURE, an exhibition bringing together the salvaged-metal animal sculptures of Michael Zant and the haiku of Tré and Thomas L. Vaultonburg of Wolf Twin Books.

Created from reclaimed and repurposed materials, each of Michael’s sculptures will be accompanied by two original haiku—one written by Tré and one by Vaultonburg—inspired by the animal or wild creature it depicts. The exhibition celebrates the wild lives around us, the possibilities hidden within discarded things, and the idea that everything deserves a second nature.

Michael builds his animals from metal objects that have already lived one life. Chains become tentacles. Old tools become claws, wings, legs, and bones. Parts once designed for work or machinery are rearranged until they begin to resemble something living. The finished sculptures retain the history of their materials while acquiring personalities of their own.

The haiku approach the same animals from two different directions. Tré and Vaultonburg have collaborated before, most notably on Moonscape: Haiku Phase I, but SECOND NATURE gives that collaboration a new structure. Each poet responds independently to the same sculpture, creating a small conversation beside it. Sometimes the two poems occupy the same landscape. Sometimes they wander into entirely different worlds.

For Michael’s bear sculpture, Vaultonburg imagines a mother recording her family in the forest:

with one paw Mama Bear
carves in pine the names of
all five of her cubs

—Thomas L. Vaultonburg

Tré finds another bear who has become perhaps a little too comfortable around people:

veteran camper—
a black bear sitting
at the picnic table

—Tré

A sculpture with chains for tentacles inspired a pairing that moves from the history of the material into the strange physical presence of an octopus:

old chains
remembering how
to be tentacles

—Thomas L. Vaultonburg

tasting the shape
of my face
all eight arms

—Tré

These poems will not be presented as conventional framed pieces hanging at a safe distance from the art. They will appear on small, simple displays beside the sculptures. The presentation is intentionally modest and low-tech, allowing the salvaged metal, the animals, and the words to remain the center of attention.

The project grew naturally from the shared interests of the three artists. Michael Zant transforms discarded materials into representations of living creatures. Tré and Vaultonburg write poems grounded in animals, seasons, observation, and the Midwestern landscape. Together, the sculptures and haiku ask viewers to look again—not only at things that have been thrown away, but at the wild lives that continue around us whether we notice them or not.

SECOND NATURE is also a benefit for Wild Roots. Copies of Vaultonburg’s 2026 haiku collection, Vanished Roads, will be available at Rockford Art Deli, with $10 from every copy sold there donated to Wild Roots.

The exhibition is part of Rockford’s Fall ArtScene and is free to attend.

SECOND NATURE
Salvaged Metal Sculpture & Haiku
Michael Zant + Tré + Thomas L. Vaultonburg

Friday, October 2, 2026: 5–9 p.m.
Saturday, October 3, 2026: 4–9 p.m.

Rockford Art Deli
402 E. State St.
Rockford, Illinois

Admission is free.

More information: Rockford Art Deli

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Vanished Roads: Making a Haiku Collection Tell a Story

One thing that mattered to us from the beginning with Vanished Roads was that it become a whole book, not simply a stack of haiku that happened to have the same author's name on them.

                    

That distinction might seem small, especially with haiku. A haiku is designed to survive on its own. It has its own little weather system, its own moment, its own beginning and ending. You can open a collection almost anywhere, read one poem, close the book, and theoretically you have experienced something complete. There is nothing wrong with making a collection that way. But that wasn't what I wanted Vanished Roads to be.

The poems had accumulated over a long and difficult period of my life, and when I began looking at them together I realized they weren't actually separate. Certain things kept returning: abandoned places, animals, roads, weather, objects people had discarded, small signs of persistence, and moments when the natural world seemed to be quietly reclaiming whatever human beings had left behind. More importantly, the emotional atmosphere of the poems changed. There was movement in them.

Once I saw that, sequencing became part of the writing.

The book begins in a darker and more enclosed place and gradually moves outward. It doesn't suddenly announce that everything is better. I wouldn't have believed a book that did that, and I certainly couldn't have written one. Instead, little openings begin appearing. The world becomes visible again. Animals arrive. Light changes. Humor returns. The landscape starts becoming something other than a backdrop for loss.

That same movement became important visually.

Tré's cover for Vanished Roads isn't simply packaging placed around the poems after the fact. The enormous tree, the narrow passage through it, the distant light and the road continuing beyond it all belong to the same journey the poems are making. Her illustrations throughout the book work the same way. We wanted the visual and poetic elements to feel as though they had grown from the same landscape.

That's why Michael Dylan Welch's description of Vanished Roads as a “well-designed haiku collection” pleased me so much. He also described the experience of reading it as one of “enjoyable patience.” Both observations get at something we were consciously trying to accomplish. The book isn't asking the reader to race toward a conclusion. Its changes happen incrementally, poem by poem, image by image.

Maybe that's appropriate for haiku. Emergence doesn't require a trumpet blast.

Sometimes it's just the next thing you notice.

Vanished Roads by Thomas L. Vaultonburg, with cover and illustrations by Tré, was published by Wolf Twin Books in 2026.

Vanished Roads at Wolf Twin Books

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Vanished Roads: A Review by Pippa Phillips, Editor of Prune Juice Journal

 Vanished Roads

A Review by Pippa Phillips, Editor of Prune Juice Journal

Thomas L. Vaultonburg’s Vanished Roads, a collection of haiku (and, to my mind, senryu), is a pleasure to read, possessing a satisfying variety united by thematic throughlines. The tone ranges from the homey to the surreal, the author's voice unobtrusive but personal. It has the feeling of a deep, light night conversation with an old friend: intimate, unforced, occasionally funny, and capable of sudden profundity.

Buy Vanished Roads

The volume features a number of stand-out poems, several of which I will examine. What strikes me is its genuine popular appeal: these poems have a muscular simplicity without sacrificing depth.

Vaultonburg demonstrates a highly developed sense of the possibilities of the micropoem. The poems drift from outside to inside, through the seasons, from lightness to grief, even in the same poem:

spin fast enough

and the wound

becomes a door

Here, strange logic brings the poem to a surreal conclusion. The imperative casts an immediate spell, pulling you into the orbit of the grotesque before abruptly opening a way out– or is it in? Vaultonburg makes use of the double meaning of ‘wound’– perhaps (because of the spinning) it’s the past participle of ‘wind’, like a watch. More likely, it’s an injury. Implication likens the latter to something else that both opens and serves as a barrier. If the body is a house, trauma is an unwelcome guest.

Grief lurks in the domestic– furniture, a coat, in a woodpile, in a door: Vaultonburg grounds regret, perseverance, transcendence, and joy in the concrete. The poems’ emotional and philosophical weight emerges through the transformation of ordinary objects and experiences.

The poems demonstrate effective use of Western literary techniques, while also displaying a wonderful sense of many Japanese aesthetics. Here, Vaultonburg’s use of personification has a plausible deniability– perhaps the author is not talking to a storm, but the reader.

storm clearing—

you too

are allowed to arrive

Below, the poet cultivates an atmosphere of holy mystery in just a few strokes. This haiku initiates the reader by calling attention to lapsed attention. Already we are focused on what is missing– the deer. Only, it hasn’t departed. It has transformed into something else, something that remains. This is yūgen, the grace that works beyond human ken.

not watching

the moment the deer

becomes the woods again

Vaultonburg’s poems are artless in the best sense– they don’t wear their artistry on their sleeve. They are accessible without becoming simple, sophisticated without becoming complicated. Again and again, things shift into other things: a wound becomes a door, a deer becomes the woods, a hat becomes a pilgrim. There is a weight that the artist refuses to succumb to, a tempered joy. A solid and satisfactory collection.

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Send in the Schizoid Kid: A Life Observed From the Outside

I found out I had Schizoid Personality Disorder by accident. I was fifteen years old, sitting in the waiting room of my psychiatrist's office. His door was open, and I heard him tell his secretary, “Send in the schizoid kid.” That was me.

Like most people who hear the word schizoid, particularly a fifteen-year-old in the early 1980s, I thought it meant schizophrenia. Nobody sat me down and explained the diagnosis. Nobody gave me a pamphlet describing what it might mean for the rest of my life. There was no internet to consult when I got home. There wasn't even much of a popular vocabulary for discussing these things. The diagnosis would not be formally revealed to me until decades later, when that same psychiatrist testified during my disability hearing and confirmed that Schizoid Personality Disorder was indeed what he had diagnosed me with as a teenager. By then I had already spent most of my life living it.

Schizoid Personality Disorder is a strange diagnosis partly because its defining characteristics involve absences: little desire for close relationships, preference for solitary activities, apparent indifference to praise or criticism, emotional detachment. Years ago, when writing about my book Submerged Structure, I described it as a disorder involving something missing, complicated by the fact that the person missing it may not miss it—or may not know exactly what he is supposed to be missing.

I don't know if I would describe it exactly that way today. One of the difficulties in writing about something you've lived with for more than forty years is distinguishing the condition from the person. Which parts are symptoms? Which are adaptations? Which are simply personality? Which resulted from experiences that had nothing to do with a psychiatric diagnosis at all? After this long, I don't know where one ends and another begins.

What I do know is that much of my life has felt like an exercise in observation. When I was younger, I consciously practiced behaviors other people appeared to perform automatically. Eye contact. Smiling. Shaking hands. Even walking correctly could become something to think about rather than simply something to do. I watched people and tried to determine what was expected of me. Years later I described this process as translation. Life required continually translating myself into a persona comprehensible to people who had never needed to consider that the social language they spoke naturally might be a foreign language to somebody else.

Then, in 1987, Star Trek: The Next Generation appeared on television. My favorite character was Lieutenant Commander Data. Data was an android. He was intelligent, capable and sentient, but he lacked human emotions and was fascinated by them. He observed the people around him. He studied their behavior. He attempted humor. He tried to understand friendship, affection, grief and all the strange contradictions humans accepted without seeming to notice them. I identified with him immediately. I wasn't an android trying to become human, obviously, but emotionally the metaphor was almost embarrassingly accurate. Data was doing consciously what everyone around him did instinctively. I knew something about that.

Today there is an enormous vocabulary surrounding experiences that barely had a public vocabulary when I was fifteen. Neurodivergence. Autism spectrum disorder. Masking. Sensory processing. Social communication differences. Spend a few minutes online and you can find thousands of people discussing experiences that previous generations might never have described publicly.

I don't know exactly what to make of it. When I later went to college and studied psychology, the profession seemed considerably more confident about these categories and their prevalence. Certain disorders affected a certain percentage of the population. Diagnostic categories had boundaries. At least that was the impression presented to students. Now reported diagnoses of autism spectrum disorder have increased enormously, and people publicly identify themselves as neurodivergent in numbers that would have seemed astonishing when I was young.

Why? I don't know. Diagnostic criteria have changed. Awareness has changed. Parents and teachers know what to look for. People who once would have gone undiagnosed can now be recognized. Stigma has changed. Self-reporting has changed. Whether those explanations account for everything, or whether something else is happening as well, isn't something my own experience qualifies me to decide. Nor do I know what diagnosis I would receive if I were fifteen years old today.

That question interests me, but I don't want to rewrite my life using terminology that didn't exist when I lived it. Schizoid Personality Disorder and autism are not interchangeable diagnoses. I can't travel back forty years with today's diagnostic manuals and today's understanding of neurodevelopment and submit the fifteen-year-old version of myself for reassessment. All I can report reliably is what the experience looked like from inside.

Increasingly, though, I can see what it did to my work. For years I made a distinction between the Outlaw artist and the Outsider artist. The Outlaw understands the rules and deliberately breaks them. The Outsider may never have understood why the rules existed in the first place. I once fancied myself an Outlaw. Eventually I began to suspect I had been an Outsider all along.

That distinction changed how I understood my poetry. Much of my writing has involved looking at ordinary human behavior as though it weren't ordinary. Customs, relationships, ambitions, status, work, sex, religion, death, possessions—the peculiar machinery of being human becomes visible when you aren't completely absorbed in operating it. Eventually that same observational habit moved increasingly toward the physical world: birds, roads, weeds, rivers, abandoned buildings, animals, signs and objects people have discarded. The bicycle somebody pulled out of the Rock River. An office chair sitting strangely in a window. Things encountered while walking through Rockford that thousands of other people may have passed without needing to stop.

Haiku turned out to be particularly compatible with that way of experiencing the world. You don't have to explain everything. You notice. That is essentially the method behind Hike You!, the six-year walking and haiku project I've created with photographer Ryan Davis. We walk through the city. We encounter something. Ryan photographs it. I write about it. It sounds almost ridiculously simple. Maybe it is. But I've come to realize that observation has been one of the continuous threads running through my life. When participation isn't automatic, observation becomes unusually important.

The same contradiction appears elsewhere in my work. Someone reading the diagnostic description of Schizoid Personality Disorder might reasonably expect me to have spent my life withdrawing from other people, and certainly I've done plenty of that. Solitude isn't something I tolerate until something better comes along. It is my natural state. Yet I founded Zombie Logic Press. I edited Zombie Logic Review. I've published other writers. I've organized projects. I've participated in Rockford's literary and artistic community. I've collaborated with artists. I've spent years documenting the history and peculiarities of the city where I live. Those things require other people.

The younger version of me once wrote something that is difficult for the older version to dismiss: “I want to be with you. I want to be part of the scene. I want to be human.” I don't think I'd say it quite that way anymore. I no longer believe there is some examination in human behavior I'm required to pass. But I recognize the person who wrote it.

What I've actually done, perhaps without realizing it, is construct alternative methods of participation. Writing is one of them. Publishing is another. Collaboration is another. Walking through a city with a photographer and returning with a poem is another. They allow connection without requiring me to experience connection exactly the way someone else does.

That brings me back to Submerged Structure. There used to be a sign along Route 72 between Byron and Oregon, Illinois, beside the Rock River. I saw it repeatedly when I was young. It read SUBMERGED STRUCTURE, warning that something was underneath the water. You couldn't see it from the surface, but it was there and needed to be accounted for. I couldn't stop thinking about those words. Eventually they became the title of a book.

At the time, I thought the sign was a nearly perfect metaphor for Schizoid Personality Disorder. Something was submerged within me. Maybe it had broken away. Maybe it had never developed. Maybe it remained somewhere inaccessible beneath the surface. Other people couldn't see it, and I couldn't adequately explain it. I am less certain now that anything needs to be recovered. That's one of the things forty years can change.

I don't know whether today's explosion in the language of neurodivergence will ultimately make these experiences easier for younger people. I hope it does. I hope a fifteen-year-old sitting in a psychiatrist's waiting room today doesn't have to accidentally overhear what someone has decided is happening inside his own mind. I hope somebody explains it to him. I hope he gets to ask questions. And I hope he understands that a diagnosis may describe something important about him without necessarily providing the definitive explanation of who he is.

I don't have a program to offer people with Schizoid Personality Disorder, autism spectrum disorder or any of the other conditions we now gather beneath an expanding vocabulary of human neurological difference. I'm barely able to understand my own experience. But I have forty years of evidence: poems, books, photographs, strange little observations about human behavior, publishing projects, collaborations and walks through Rockford. There is a book called Submerged Structure. There is even an old poem called “Away Message,” in which I imagined myself in geosynchronous orbit around a lost moon of Jupiter—present, but very far away.

Maybe that's what my work has been doing all this time: sending messages from wherever I am. I don't know whether someone younger, newly diagnosed or simply struggling to understand why the world seems to operate according to rules everyone else received in advance will find anything useful in those messages. I hope so. I can't give them a map, but after forty years of wandering around out here, I can leave a few signs.

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Hike You!: The Office Chair on Broadway

There are certain streets in Rockford you only really get to know by walking them.

Broadway is one of those streets. It isn’t part of every walk we take, but when we stretch things out and make a longer circuit through the city, Broadway often becomes part of the route. Walking it is different from driving it. At thirty miles an hour, storefronts become scenery. On foot, individual windows begin to announce themselves.

One of those windows belonged to the old Zant Office Equipment building.

Inside was a unique office chair.

Not an especially dramatic discovery. Not a monument, historic building, mural, or spectacular piece of architecture. Just an unusual chair sitting behind glass in a former office-equipment store. But after passing it enough times, the chair began to seem less like inventory and more like a survivor from another era.

That is essentially how Hike You! works.

The project grew out of six years of walking Rockford and paying attention to things that would ordinarily be passed without a second thought. Ryan Davis photographs what we encounter. I write haiku from those encounters. Sometimes the subject is beautiful in the conventional sense. Sometimes it is strange, neglected, funny, accidental, or so ordinary that noticing it at all becomes the point.

The chair in the Zant window had a particularly strong personality.

Something about it immediately suggested the American office of the 1980s: fluorescent lights, beige walls, wood-grain desks, metal filing cabinets, shoulder pads, coffee that had been sitting on a burner since 7:15 in the morning. It seemed to belong to a world of interoffice memos, Rolodexes, landlines, carbon copies, and people being summoned into somebody’s office.

And once that atmosphere appeared, the haiku followed.

The typography became part of the joke. Rather than treating the poem as something floating serenely over the photograph, the lettering participates in the period. The font belongs to the same imagined office world as the chair. Image, poem, and design all lean toward the same slightly absurd memory of corporate America.

That combination is important to Hike You!. These pieces aren’t intended simply as photographs with poems printed on them. The photograph provides one way of seeing the object. The haiku provides another. Sometimes the design itself becomes a third voice.

And then, occasionally, the city adds another layer long after the walk is over.

The Zant name has recently wandered back into my life in an entirely different context. I’m currently collaborating with Michael Zant, a member of the Zant family, on a salvaged-metal opossum sculpture for another Fall ArtScene exhibition at the Rockford Public Library. Michael constructs animals from discarded and reclaimed metal; I’m contributing the accompanying haiku.

There was no grand plan connecting these things.

Years ago, we walked down Broadway. We noticed a strange office chair in the window of Zant Office Equipment. Ryan photographed it. I wrote a haiku. It became one of the pieces in Hike You!

Now I’m working with a Zant on an opossum made out of salvaged metal.

That is Rockford.

Walk around it long enough and the city begins folding back on itself. A name on an old storefront becomes a person you work with years later. An obsolete office chair becomes art. Scrap metal becomes an animal. A street you have traveled hundreds of times produces something you had never noticed before.

None of this requires going very far.

It only requires going slowly enough to see it.

Hike You!
Thomas L. Vaultonburg + Ryan Davis
Fall ArtScene 2026
Rockford, Illinois

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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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