GTP Second Attempt.

This is my second attempt at a poetry exercise that involves the random selecting a lines from published poems - drawn from various sources - and trying to make the lines join in a roughly coherent way - then establishing a possible subject and theme from the material. Once I have my subject and theme try to modify the lines around some images that might crop up. I couldn't use all the lines, just like the last time I tried this out - and I had to change tenses and whole words around. In fact the first draft - because in these exercises they hardly get beyond that - what stands at a first poetic effort bears little relation to the original lines, save the initial inspiration, which it exactly what was required.

1   At length I heard a ragged noise and mirth
2   saw things that made him long for death
3   when a vast image out of spiritus mundi
4   bid a strong ghost stand at the head
5   they look up at their pale and sunken faces
6   a mystery of peculiar lore and doings
7   like souls tossing in a hell on a grill
8   the jailer of your vanity
9   roasting  rats on old coat hangers
10 two of the 'dead' roll on the ground
11 burning through the cool firs
12 makes manifest his music and his might
13 couched on the bald top of an once eminent
14 moving slowly moving sadly.

A quick read of the above is making think of a couple of tramps subsisting on a road side quite near a cemetery. They are eating rats they've by cooking them over makeshift spit or fire. They are drinking something like mentholated spirits or something they have managed to get hold of (I heard that furniture polish could be drunk if its distilled in a certain way - maybe they picked some up off an old skip or through rooting through dustbins.  Perhaps its a tramps banquet of roasted rat and distilled polish.  The image is there - but why should it be written?  Perhaps one of them in his delirium sees spirits floating over the cemetery who somehow remind him of the life he once had - a kind of admonishment for wasting his life.  

So I might be inspired to write something like this:

The Tramp's Banquet

I heard a quiet commotion
a faint rattle, desultory song
coughing out in strained mirth.
a neon glow of crammed figures
roasting rats on old coat hangers
in a flickering furnace.
A stronger ghost stood at the head
bottle swigging in wide-eyed gasps
making manifest his music and his might.
The group's pale and sunken faces
burning through the branches of
the cool firs. 

One of the dangers of this exercise is falling in love with the original lines and leaving them intact after the final edit.  It's difficult to imagine any line surviving without serious editing, rephrasing, re-words, omission etc - but it has to considered a risk nonetheless - and this could lead to accusations of plagiarism later on. Having said that it's very early days so to the worry about things that sound so improbable such as liking my poem(s)  so much I'm going to enter them into a competitions or submit them to a magazine or other outlet for consideration of publication is probably less harmful than not practicing in this way.