A Poet and You Didn't Know It

When I was a kid in British boarding school (I know, it's hard to believe I was ever a kid) I used to excel at strange things. Rugby was not one of them.

No, strangely, poetry -- yes, THAT poetry, no, NOT Shakespeare was one of them. To this day, I cannot believe what these poets must have been smoking to come up with what they did ("I wandered lonely as a cloud?" What the fuck?) but I liked it nevertheless.

Just the fact that one sentence could end in a rhyming word compared to the last one fascinated me. (If you need to know, in Japanese, popular songs never rhyme. There is no order to them whatsoever.)

But . . . "In Xanadu did Kubla Khan a Stately Pleasure Dome Decree . . ."

. . .

. . . uhhh . . .

What?

And how come these guys all had three names, like Samuel Taylor Coleridge or Edgar Allen Poe? Dante only had one, and so did Michaelangelo, (but he made up for it in little boys).

And I've said in this space that sometimes in order to get to sleep I do the rhyme puzzle -- start with a word and go down the alphabet. Can, ban, dan, fan, Han (the dynasty), jan, LAN (the network) man, pan, ran, tan, van, yan (the Chinese cooking show host) and that's just the one-syllable rhymes. I get to sleep in a hurry, if not a flurry.

So here's one: I do the first line and you do the second.

Like:

It came upon one Winter's eve

(And you say: "That Joe and Marge and I met Steve").

See how easy that is?

So let's go:

A Poem for Steve

It came upon one Winter's eve
That Joe and Marge and I met Steve
A tall man, and a strange one, too,
He -------------------------------

Go to it!