The current constraint, posted March 3:

Cento: a cento is a poem comprised of lines from other poems, by other poets.

Try your hand.

Author: Paul

Death is all metaphors, shape in one history
Time to put off the world and go somewhere
Running along a bank, a parapet,
Row after row with strict impunity
Thus should have been our travels.

But in the end one tires of the high-flown,
Bent double, like old beggars under sacks
We had to take the world as it was given.
My stutter, my cough, my unfinished sentences--
My old flame, my wife!

I traded a girl
Beautiful as the flying legend of some leopard
More beautiful and soft than any moth
That once, which pained to think of
I cannot see how in time it will be possible to look at.

Well, world, you have kept faith with me.
I got one good look.
Nothin very bad happen to me lately
Since I emerged that day from the labyrinth
That year of the cloud, when my marriage failed.

They that in play, can do the things they would,
Who are these? Why sit they here in twilight?
Secret they are, sealed, annealed, and brainless.
Death is another milestone on their way.
Now light the candles, one, two; there's a moth

[taken from the index of first lines of the Norton Anthology of Modern Poetry, 1973]

Author: Kieca

Against the rubber tongues of cows and the hoeing hands of men
His body is just the engine shoving it forward,
An eye powdered over, half melted and solid again
Suddenly his poor body
It enters the dark hole of the head.

Adam ate the apple
Like a king in hiding. Crying to the old shape of the starlit land,
Carrying his head like a brazier of spilling embers
Because his nose and face were one festering sore
Making no sound.

God tried to teach Crow how to talk.
Between his back teeth he has to wear his skin out
Ideas that collapse
Every one a revengeful burst
I shot him between the ears.

Inside my head
Corruption of the facts.
The fly is fouled in web. Intelligence, the spider,
Making small movements in gray air
Hurrying through the underworld, soundless.

So the self under the eye lies
Back to the ordinary.
The head with its vocabulary useless,
Asking to be banished,
As the drug argues deeper and deeper.

-taken from the selection of Ted Hughes' poems in the goode olde Norton Anthology of poetry, 1973. Each of the five verse paragraphs contain lines from five separate poems.