Dear Susan, Matt (twice!), Jim, and Carl,
Thanks very much for your helpful feedback. I'm very grateful. Draft Three posted above, in response to your (and others' prior) quibbles -- the main one being about the lack of variety in the repetends. I changed things up a bit at the end in this draft. In other poems with repetends, I usually employ a bunch of puns and punctuation changes to vary them, but here it seemed more heartfelt to keep making the same plaint over and over again.
Speaking of "again," I don't have a subscription to the Dictionary of American Regional English, but
a StackExchange discussion of the word's pronunciation gives |əˈgɪn| as a variant "throughout US esp among older and less educ speakers". (My hick origins are showing, I guess.) That said, I prefer having most readers hear "again" as an off-rhyme to any of the alt lines I came up with.
Chicken
à la King might be a generational thing. I've changed it to Tuna
à la King in this draft so it's not quite so far from caviar.
Again, thanks for your help, everyone.
Linear Mode
