I don't have any suggestions. I want to say the poem has improved through the process of comments and your responses to the comments. It's great to watch the workshop process work.
Well, I just don't have the energy to take a poem all the way through on my own these days, but I can use the workshop process to break the process down into small steps.
I learned a lot working on this poem about communicating intent.
If you can't play games with language in a poem, then where can you play them?
Yves, I agree, but I don't think you need to be so overt to get the wordplay here across. To me, it just comes across as a typo, or trying too hard to be clever.