Cyrus was a good poet when he wrote, but he rarely actually wrote. Before getting sober, Cyrus didn’t write so much as he drank about writing, describing booze as essential to his process, “nearly sacramental”—he really said it like that—in the way it “opened his mind to the hidden voice” beneath the mundane “argle-bargle of the every-day.” Of course, when he drank, he rarely did anything else but drink.
