The Happy Drunk

Give me beer and whiskey, whiskey and beer,

I’ll drink ‘til my mind and the moon are set.

Play me a love song called Do not Forget

Make me a promise, and make it sincere.

Fill me with longing and loving and fear;

Hear me reciting the same old regrets;

Tell me with smiles that we two are ill-met

Then lean into me and close to my ear

Hiccup. Sing whispers out of tune.

Build me a house made of deuces and nines;

Breathe on it whiskily, watch it fall down.

Watch hearts lose again, hers flushing with mine.

See me from under a drooping eyelash;

What you see is the dregs that she left in the glass.

N. Walsh

1999 approx.

Give me beer and whiskey, whiskey and beer,

I’ll drink ‘til my mind and the moon are set.

Happy Drunk




Give me beer and whiskey, whiskey and beer,

I’ll drink ‘til my mind and the moon are set.

Play me a love song called Do not Forget

Make me a promise, and make it sincere.

Fill me with longing and loving and fear;

Hear me reciting the same old regrets;

Tell me with smiles that we two are ill-met

Then lean into me and close to my ear

Hiccup. Sing whispers out of tune.

Build me a house made of deuces and nines;

Breathe on it whiskily, watch it fall down.

Watch hearts lose again, hers flushing with mine.

See me from under a drooping eyelash;

What you see is the dregs that she left in the glass.

Play me a love song called Do not Forget

Make me a promise, and make it sincere.

Fill me with longing and loving and fear;

Hear me reciting the same old regrets;

Tell me with smiles that we two are ill-met

Then lean into me and close to my ear

Hiccup. Sing whispers out of tune.

Build me a house made of deuces and nines;

Breathe on it whiskily, watch it fall down.

Watch hearts lose again, hers flushing with mine.

See me from under a drooping eyelash;

What you see is the dregs that she left in the glass.

Composition

I have often thought how interesting a magazine paper might be written by any author who would--that is to say, who could--detail, step by step, 

the processes by which any of his compositions attained its ultimate point of completion. Why such a paper has never been given to the world, I am much at a loss to say--but perhaps, the autorial vanity has had more to do with the omission than any one other cause. Most writers--poets in especial--prefer having it understood that they compose by a species of fine frenzy--an ecstatic intuition--and would positively shudder at letting the public take a peep behind the scenes, at the elaborate and vacillating crudities of thought--at the true purposes seized only at the last moment--at the innumerable glimpses of idea that arrived not at the maturity of full view--at the fully matured fancies discarded in despair as unmanageable--at the cautious selections and rejections--at the painful erasures and interpolations--in a word, at the wheels and pinions--the tackle for scene-shifting--the step-ladders and demon-traps--the cock's feathers, the red paint and the black patches, which in ninety-nine cases out of the hundred, constitute the properties of the literary histrio.

From "The Philosophy of Composition"

E. A. Poe

"Madness!"

Ebenezer frowned and squinted. "I'll come," he said finally, and went out with Burlingame to the horses. The night was wild, but not unpleasant: a warm, damp wind roared out of the southwest, churned the river to a froth, bent the pines like whips, and drove a scud across the stars. Both men looked up at the splendid night.

"Forget the word sky," Burlingame said off-handedly, swinging up on his gelding, "'tis a blinder to your eyes. There is no dome of heaven yonder."

Ebenezer blinked twice or thrice: with the aid of these instructions, for the first time in his life he saw the night sky. The stars were no longer points on a black hemisphere that hung like a sheltering roof above his head; the relationship between them he saw now in three dimensions, of which the one most deeply felt was depth. The length and breadth of space between the stars seemed trifling by comparison: what struck him now was that some were nearer, some farther out, and others unimaginably remote. Viewed in this manner, the constellations lost their sense entirely; their spurious character revealed itself, as did the false presupposition of the celestial navigator, and Ebenezer felt bereft of orientation. He could no longer think of up and down: the stars were simply out there, as well below him as above, and the wind appeared to howl not from the Bay6 but from the firmament itself, the endless corridors of space.

"Madness!" Henry whispered.

Ebenezer's stomach churned; he swayed in the saddle and covered his eyes. For a swooning moment before he turned away it seemed that he was heels over head on the bottom of the planet, looking down on the stars instead of up, and that only by dint of clutching his legs about the roan mare's girth and holding fast to the saddlebow with both his hands did he keep from dropping headlong into those vasty7 reaches!

The Sot-Weed Factor

John Barth