Years ago, when I was an undergraduate and first began writing (mostly anonymously, for the likes of Bogmopolitan and various other similarly ephemeral student rags), I created for myself the persona of 'The Vodka Poet', a man whose creative Muse was rather too dependent on the excessive consumption of alcohol (it was all just a literary conceit, I assure you - I was never that much of a drinker, and hardly ever touch vodka; somehow that spirit always seems to have been emblematic of the 'problem drinker' to me - "Look at the state of him! Looks like he puts vodka on his cornflakes for breakfast.").
Certain lines from those early 'vodka poems' have stayed with me down the years.
For instance:
Prometheus's liver grew again,
But I've seen the last of mine!
We, the thieves of heaven's fire,
Should expect no lesser fine.
I have always particularly liked that phrase "thieves of heaven's fire" to describe us creative, arty-farty types; and I felt even at the time that it really deserved a better home than that (deliberately!) bathetic stanza. I've been meaning to "do something with it" for nearly 20 years now, but I still haven't thought of what.
Another favourite line from that era (influenced, no doubt, by Wilde's famous epigram) was this:
There's a melancholy grandeur
In the view the gutter gives...
Strange how these trifles lodge so persistently in the memory, when so much else is lost.
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