They tacked Professor Hudson by following his trail of destruction. Scattered and tattered papers at a poetry slam in Moose’s Bar. A trail of detritus leading from open mic night at Shooley’s Pub through the library and out the emergency exit. When the great author and sometime lecturer was finally found, he was passed out half-naked on a suburban lawn that wasn’t even close to his own.
Incholate, Hudson would only groan at them when prodded, spurting gibberish in a definite a-b-a-b, c-d-c-d, e-f-e-f, g-g rhyme pattern.
“Come on, professor,” said Lucy, “we have to get you home.”
“Love is too young to know what conscience is/Yet who knows not conscience is born of love?” Hudson groaned convulsively. He rolled over and lay face-down in a pool of composition textbook pages.
“Oh man, oh man!” cried Adam, who was not at all used to Hudson’s escapades. “This is bad. What’s wrong with him?”
“Then, gentle cheater, urge not my amiss/Lest guilty of my faults thy sweet self prove.” Hudson spat out the words as if they were choice-cut chewing tobacco.
“Isn’t it obvious?” said Lucy, a veteran of hauling Hudson hither and yon in the dead of night. “He went on another sonnet bender. He’s been reading and writing them all night, and his brain sonnet level is probably way north of .08.”
“For, thou betraying me, I do betray/My nobler part to my gross body’s treason,” said the professor with a sound halfway between a sneeze and vomiting.
“What are we gonna do?” Adam was on the verge of panic.
“Don’t worry. We just need to get the poetry content of his brain down a little bit so we can walk him home,” said Lucy. “Did you bring that copy of Emery’s Twilight of the Vampires like I asked?”
Excerpts From Nonexistent Books 