On a dry summer’s afternoon I crash
my overwrought computer, wipe the sweat
from my psyche, fill my flask
with Sir John’s golden blend of twelve-year-old
nectar, snap my chains and exit my cell,
skip rapidly to the corner and hang a left on Independence,
hail a yellow chariot to the international airport,
stow away on a private plane to Iceland, maneuver
a snowmobile to the top of the world, scale
a glacier cap, chip a cube of ice to cool my Dewar‘s,
bypass the volcanoes, slip and slide to Husavik
to watch the whales play.
 
At daybreak I take a tanker to London, ride
the rail to Birmingham and (advised by a lovely friend)
depart immediately by cattle truck for Aberystwyth,
a Welsh town on Cardigan Bay, refuel at a kindly canteen,
rent a bike and peddle past iron-age ruins (avoiding
Cyoeraeth, the hag of the mist, and her shrill threats
of peril) to Cardiff’s trendy waterfront, proceed
to Flat Holm Island to seek the sanction of the gulls,
turn south and coast with the wind to Swansea, playfully
praised by native son Dylan Thomas as that ugly, lovely town
on the oceanfront sweep to Mumbles, named for the chap
who christened the twin rocks at the tip of this headland,
The Breasts. There I have a wee taste of malt,
visit the National Library which (says my friend) stacks
every British book ever published, read a page or two
in Keats and Shelley, doze through The Religious Experience
of Hugh Walpole, fearlessly embrace Virginia Wolfe.
 
Come noon I board the Swansea Ferry to Ireland,
and in Cork, pronounced Corcaigh, a foggy
seafaring town founded by Vikings, native home of Sean O’Fealan
who penned The Man Who Invented Sin,
and celebrated as the town that gave the world Sildenafil,
a recreational pill marketed today as Viagra,
I pause for an ale or two at Kavanagh’s, crawl north
via the town’s confusion of bridges, ultimately arrive at Dublin
to savor the city’s arts and spirits
on an all-night Joycean Pub Crawl, terminating
at Davy Byrne’s to greet the dawn with Leopold Bloom.
 
The balance of the trip is a blur, but I think
I journey to MacBeth’s Castle to walk the halls
with Banquo‘s ghost, hike the Highlands to gather a bouquet
of purple heather, go for a loch swim to pal around
with Nessie, or likely petition an itinerant troll to refill
my flask with Scotland’s water of life.