An Unintentional Poem

Two of my Spanish II students asked me if they could see me after class today. I raised my eyebrows, for they are two of my top students, but I said sure. As the rest of the crew filed out, I sat down with them and asked, "What's up?"

"We want to read you a poem," they said. "Actually, it's a poem YOU wrote."

"Really??" I said, surprised (I do wax poetic in my classes from time to time, but hadn't done so recently that I could recall), "*I* wrote a poem?"

"Yes," they nodded, and proceeded to read. It began thusly...

At least
Maybe
It’s not my fault
This is how we are
People
Like I was saying, ...

A long time ago
Once upon a time
A terrible cold
So,...
It turns out that...
And what’s more...
He wasn’t too bright
So to speak
Who with half a brain...

Of course, ...
As soon as...
I knocked at the door
Go into

I was about to...
My nose began to itch
I felt like
I let loose a sneeze

Do you know what happened?
The darned house
Dead as a doornail
It seemed a shame
.
.
.


What they were reading to me was the list of idiomatic vocab I was asking them to find in the story they were reading! The spacing you see is actually the paragraph spacing in the story, so they could more easily find the expressions in context. They read it with beautiful poetic voice and inflection, and I was cracking up at how well it read the way it was written. After I got done laughing I think I said something about how I must not be doing my job well if they've got time to figure out how to make poems out of my vocab lists, but I was very, very impressed.

Can you tell what story the vocab is from? I'll give you a hint: Think common fairy tale.