Borrowed Words Poetry

[Borrowed Word poetry is something I picked up in high school, I think; the idea is that you take the words of someone else and recompose them. It's a mix of collaboration and inspiration that allows you to generate ideas less linearly and is, I hope, not actually plagiarism.

In any case, the following poem was composed using only words and phrases pulled directly from T S Eliot's The Wasteland. Everything -- including verb tenses and articles -- came from the original work.

Mr. Eliot: please don't sue.


To Play A Game

And as we talked, I found you there
In a garden of your images,
Arms and hands and fingers
Wrapt softly round white bodies, red sails
Gliding over the violet air.

You show me something different
Those strings of pearls, fruited vines of ivory
That run softly down your back,
Draped in your shadow at evening,
In empty rooms, in faint moonlight.

I spoke of nightfall with you, the scene
Framed by marble walls, each red flash
Like so many caresses, mixing memory with desire
Like a bridge of reflecting light over a calm sea;
And through a window of unlit fog, red and
gold, we talked for an hour in whispers,
and rose and fell and glowed into words.
Goodnight. Goodnight.