A Poetry Game, Players Welcome

Digging in the clutter I came across a literary game I played in the back of a college notebook. (I should have been taking notes.)

It’s simple. Write down a well-known line from a poem and provide an unsuitable second line. Another way to play: Make up a random and outrageous second line and have someone guess the first.

Here are some examples from back then: Feel free to provide your alternative second lines.

They flee from me, that sometime did me seek
Not surprising since I now carry an M-16 rifle.

Whose woods these are I think I know
But property is theft so who gives a shit?

I wander thro’ each charter‘d street
And get lost because my map is upside down.

On either side the river lie
Empty beer bottles and rubber tyres.

In Xanadu did Kubla Khan
Cry: “Down with American Imperialism.”

Let me not to the marriage of true minds admit impediment
But just confess that the whole thing is a crock.

Much have I traveled in the realms of gold
And now I have a house in the Hamptons and still haven’t been caught.

Lay your sleeping head my love
Somewhere else, I’ve got a cramp in my shoulder

There was a child went forth every day
It was an unfair system and his parents were working class.

Softly in the dusk a woman is singing to me
Shut up you old bag I’m watching the cricket.

Twas brillig and the slithy toves
Never did learn to spell correctly.

Time to Play

Here’s an excessively long list of random first lines. Skip through it. Got any rejoinders?

Any other first lines come to mind? Set them as a challenge to be completed.

____________________

We wear the mask that grins and lies

I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked

The Assyrian came down like a wolf on the fold

Wee, sleeket, cowran, tim’rous beastie

He came home. Said nothing.

They fuck you up, your mum and dad

A little called anything shows shudders

If you can keep your head when all about you

The difference between poetry and rhetoric

O Captain! My Captain! our fearful trip is done

Two roads diverged in a yellow wood

A thing of beauty is a joy for ever

In Flanders fields the poppies blow

The sea is calm tonight

If I should die think only this of me

Among twenty snowy mountains 

To see a world in a grain of sand,

When I have fears that I may cease to be

Humpty Dumpty sat on a wall

What happens to a dream deferred?

Once upon a midnight dreary, while I pondered, weak and weary

I was angry with my friend

Turning and turning in the widening gyre

I met a traveller from an antique land

Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?

Sundays too my father got up early

It is not the moon, I tell you

She walks in beauty like the night

Death be not proud, though some have called thee

The King sits in Dunfermline town

A cold coming we had of it

I must go down to the seas again, to the lonely sea and the sky

The Owl and the Pussycat went to sea

Love set you going like a fat gold watch

Have fun!