Padraig, as Irish as any Joyce or Stephens, O’Nolan or Beckett, Behan or Heaney, or any saloonkeeper named Clancy, could no longer reliably distinguish the theme for Irish Spring soap from the theme for Lucky Charms cereal: somehow, the old Old Spice theme would intrude on the one and interweave with the other—maybe he did need to cut back on his consumption of Tullamore after all, or at least maybe stop cutting it with the Bushmills.

He’d not bathed or showered with Irish Spring in decades, had not managed as much as a spoonful of Lucky Charms since the age of nine, had never worn Old Spice at all, not even in high school, and had not owned a television set in over twenty years, but he had started his day with a dose of Tullamore, after scrambled eggs and toast. The coffeemaker had been a reliable Krups model until the day before, and now he had to decide whether to toss the whole thing out or keep the glass carafe for watering his African violets and cacti, plus he had to plan for its replacement if he hoped to continue drinking coffee.

Maybe the dose of Tullamore would do for this day, he had work to do, and he was already behind. He’d lost months (thirty-eight) and years (the three, with the two months) in the haze and clouds of cannabis consumption while residing in Colorado: but now those days were weeks (eleven) and months (the two, with the three weeks and however many-odd days) behind, even prior to his pending move to Tennessee. Both his long-term and short-term memories were returning, though he still detected curious omissions for tunes he’d once thought stamped on his brain forever. He resisted thinking that his cerebral cortices or brain stem could have sustained so much cumulative or lasting impairment, but maybe the trouble lurked in his neurotransmitters.

The two swigs of Tullamore still shook the tongue inside his mouth as he stared at the blank screen. He’d sat with it for almost a quarter-hour but had typed not one word. Resisting a second dose of Tullamore so early, he went to his library window to cast a glance once more at Pike’s Peak: this morning of the last Monday in December, it was entirely shrouded in cloud, and even the closer, shorter, forested peaks were blanketed in grey murk and mist. Pah! The bottle of Tullamore beckoned from downstairs, yet his knees ached too much for the descent.

The poem damned sure was not writing itself. The first draft of the first line finally came out hendecasyllabic, but he managed to reduce it to standard pentameter before inspiration really hit and he pared it down to tetrameter, but now it had gotten stuck in between the latter two, and his proffered second line was resisting completion altogether: “frolicked in the loch of Inverness,/the monster . . .”

“. . . swooned under her sweet caress”? Doubtful, since he lacked an antecedent for “her” this early. —but wait: this had come out of the dream he’d had just before waking, a nostalgia fueled by his former love of Speyside single-malts and the fleeting memory of that girl Tara he’d not thought of in years. —but who’s supposed to be doing the frolicking, she or the monster? He still had time to introduce her formally in the second couplet or even the following stanza. Hmm.

From downstairs the Tullamore sang his name with the enchantments of a lonely siren, but he first had to hear the Austin Lounge Lizards’ studio version of “Highway Café of the Damned”. Ahhh! —but first, even before that, genuine inspiration arrived: “. . . swooned beneath her sweet caress”! Now he was getting somewhere!

– Edward Burke