Whatever Happened To Old What's His Name?

Thomas L. Vaultonburg is a poet familiar to many in the literaru inner circle. His first book, Concave Buddha, won many awards, including the prestigious Strahd von Zarovich First Book Award, and his follow up, Detached Retinas, published seven years later by Zombie Logic Press heralded in the age of self-publishing that millions and millions of writers have since emulated. But then Vaultonburg disappeared. 

What happened to the promising young poet many were calling the next Bukowski?

I don't know.

Maybe he got a job. Maybe he just didn't anything left to say. 

Or maybe he was writing the entire time. On packing slips in the warehouses he was working in, and on cocktail napkins at the bras he was drinking in. Maybe those poems went into a book titled Flesh Wounds.

Buy Flesh Wounds 

   Collected 

   Say something interesting. 
   Come to our dinner party 
   And insult our queer friends. 
   Please stay in our basement 
   And pee in our sink. 

   You’re our very first poet. 
   We were hoping for PP 
   But we heard some nice 
   Things about you, too. 

   Say something outrageous. 
   Eat light bulbs and peanut 
   Butter and be feral and 
   Nasty and awful to us. 

   You’re a real poet. 

   Come out on the town with us 
   And cause a scene. 
   Drink enough for us all 
   And go to jail for us all. 

   Please get us some 
   Good drugs. Don’t forget 
   To write nice things 
   About us. 

   You don’t mind, 
   Do you? 

Maybe he eventually got sick of having all that fun and became a family man who wears khakis and listens to yacht rock. Maybe some of the younger people he plays Dungeons and Dragons with on Tuesday nights tried to convince him that Nickleback is dad rock and he just bit his tongue and let them keep talking. Maybe poetry just isn't that important to him anymore. Does he even have a book left in him? I don't know. 

Buy Submerged Structure 

Same Shit, Different Day 

On Anderson Cooper 
360 last night 
Dr. Gupta recommended 
A regular inspection 
Of stool samples to 
Ensure proper digestion 
And absorption of 
Objects intended for 
Nourishment. 

Later that evening 
I read in Wolfram 
Van Punkblausen's tome 
Might and Magic if I 
Wrote the names of 
My enemies on paper, 
Smeared them in shit 
And blood, then 
Swallowed it, I'd 
Absorb their souls... 

So I did. 

Next evening at work 
When Mean-Eyed Joe 
From Human Resources 

Invoked the 
Bumper sticker classic 
"Same shit different day" 

We were finally on equal
Intellectual footing.

"You got that right, man,
I laughed,
Feeling more regular
Already.