With a twist - there are first lines from famous poems - what would you do with them?

How do I love thee?

I met a traveler from an antique land

i praise thee god for most

I hope that I shall never see

Once upon a midnight dreary

Slowly, silently, now the moon

A single flower he sent me, since we met

as the poems go into the thousands

I walk down the garden paths,

I am not your favorite blowup fuckdoll

(yeah, yeah, so the last line isn't from a famous poem. It's one of mine. Still.)

i am not your favorite blowup fuckdoll
- the kind that has holes in all the right places,
no vibration or internal heating,
no life-like latex or posable joints;
i lack the bendable 'pose to suit any position'
your closet toy seems to have it all.

i feel more like hard plastic;
- armless and cheap,
- broke-down and headless,
- grey with no pleasurable features,
- like a Walmart manequin,
just throw some pretty clothes on me
- so i look nice in public ,
and call it a lay.

nice one Hrrs.

How do I love thee?
You didn't
come with
instructions...
Maybe I'm just
too in love
with me -
Hence,
all these
fucking ructions

ha! good one LFN~~

as the poems go into the thousands
the thousands go into the poems
and some writing prompt is divised
and writing is divided into the division
whereupon you are left with the leftovers
from the leftfield in the left hand column

Once upon a midnight dreary life
a spark echoed at me from a recess

my turn to gaze the cold, flat surface
of the mirrors I so glibly held to others

dropping luck and experience into the past
I faced the future with dry wisdom

even the cynics are following the light
I thought to myself, of myself, that night

a depressive, narcissistic, cynic
an optimistic, determined, hero

and the rest was for the novel
the stream of consciousness,
writing this, said and wrote

how do i love thee
like a tree that long for water
why do i love thee
when every time you put my heart to slaughter

Keep 'em coming, guys - I like these. Harris, not a bad riff on my own first line . That's one of those poems that I "lost"... It was my signature poem when I used to slam. It never made it into a chapbook and when my first hard-drive turned into swiss cheese, it - along with a re-writing of it - disappeared forever. I have stray lines of both hanging around in my head, but neither of them whole.

I hope that I shall never see
another grecian urn
filled to the brim
with absinthe
bought with money
that you burned

I met a traveler from an antique land
who told me of riches thats well inside my hand
at first i thought he was a bum
trying to trick me for some rum
then i realised he had a point
so i invited him to come smoke a joint

Slowly, silently, now the moon
comes
into bright black and grey
on my desktop.

My keyboard is cold. I need
my
sweater and where is
my telephone?
I
haven’t seen it since Tuesday morning.
My fingers
reach out

to turn the tv volume
down
or turn off the tv
or brush my cheek
or brush my desktop.
I look out the window- My neighbours
laugh through the snow to their rusty truck
and off to the Sunday night service.

I

like
my tea
from leaves, not a bag.

A single flower he sent me, since we met
he'll have to a field-full if he wants to see me wet

chameleon wrote:

Keep 'em coming, guys - I like these. Harris, not a bad riff on my own first line . That's one of those poems that I "lost"... It was my signature poem when I used to slam. It never made it into a chapbook and when my first hard-drive turned into swiss cheese, it - along with a re-writing of it - disappeared forever. I have stray lines of both hanging around in my head, but neither of them whole.

is there a chance that someone you know or a local poet may have a recording of a slam you attended and read this at??

i am always sad when people lose a form of art - i had a car broken into when i lived in michigan and a backback was an item taken... which had everything i had ever written in it, i only had a few duplicate copies of the works lost.