They were all poets and cavaliers.  If you asked them a question, they would respond with a flight of fancy. 

“What is the weather like?” 

“Whether the weather likes what the weather is like I am not disposed to say.  Yet I vow my sunny disposition is brightened by this sun, which steadfast glow shall never be put out, be it enclouded or endarkened to our view.” 

You could not break them out of it.  If you pressed them hard enough for a straight answer on some practical point, they simply switched and let their other head talk to you. 

You see, all these creatures had two heads.

  Normally the sober head remained mute in the background.  But when verbal legerdemain and irrepressible romantic derring-do were not equal to the situation, the sober head would take over and the poet head would look off into the distance resolutely ignoring the sordid practicalities occurring in front of it.

One day, one poet’s sober head fell into a deep sleep from which it could not be roused.  The poet head was greatly distressed.  He could not think in terms of efficiency and sturdy  common sense.  Yet he hungered, and thirsted, and was cold and wet.  He could not withdraw into his mind, daydreaming, and find on coming to himself that during his reverie all his needs had been attended to.

First, he discovered that his suffering made his taste for beauty deeper and more poignant.  His poetic faculty began to throb with a basso beat.  “What great woe has whet  my tongue!” he said.  And then, with his poetic soul engaged to a level it never had been before, he found the genius to attempt the impossible.  He himself, the poet head, would attempt to do the practicalities.  he made a mess of them.  He floundered.  His garden turned to mud when he lost himself in the sparkle of the water from the hose and flooded it.  He then dashed in to rescue the soil from the water, thinking to somehow fight water, and thrashed himself deep into the muck.  He made just enough shift to survive.  He was ragged, haggard, and worn.  But he saw the beauty and boldness in his blazing quest to survive no matter the difficulties.  He raised his voice in a song of the glory of his haggardness, and all who heard it were amazed.

He discovered that with experience, his intuition and his sense of elegance often led him to do practical things right.  A sense of what was fitting, of what was holistic and thematically appropriate, of pacing and rhythm, would lead him the right way.  He repaired his house.  The repair was done solidly and well.  His garden grew food.  His cattle began to fill out.  He challenged sober heads to mad contests of production.  He said, “my poetry  was another coat of paint on the unknown wood.  Now it comes from the heart of things, like a seed rising green from the soil.”

He prospered more than any sober head had done.  His wealth and dominion grew to fill the land.  His poetry moved even the sober heads to tears, and the poet heads it drove mad or to speak in tongues.  His dash, his romantic flair for escapades, raised up kingdoms and threw down empires.