Of Trickle Down
He's been a clown
From the very beginning.
Arthur Laffer
Trickle's staffer
Began tax receipts thinning.
In Trickle's tide
Most boats did slide
Lurching downward and spinning.
Some years later
The telestrator
Says we're in the ninth inning.
While Trickle smiles
Impish with guile
Cause his buddies are winning.
Shows must go on
Even Trickle's con
So we whine while he's grinning.
Trickle Downes (revised)
ReplyDeleteOf Trickle Down
He's been a clown
From the beginning.
Arthur Laffer
Trickle's staffer
Our taxes thinning.
In Trickle's tide
Boats mostly slide
Downward and spinning.
The years have passed
Until at last
It's the ninth inning.
While Trickle smiles
Impish with guiles
His buddies are winning.
Shows must go on
Even Trickle's con
We whine, he's grinning.
(just trying to help)
Stephen - thanks for the suggestions. At the risk of over thinking all of this, here is my reaction.
ReplyDeleteI'm getting two points from your modified version. One is about pruning redundant words. That makes sense. The other is about the rhythm of the piece. I've been doing that by what sounds right in my head, not by any rules. I've got other rhymes, such as Filly Buster, that are similar in their rhythms.
Perhaps on my next few attempts I will try to find pieces of music and write to those, so the music sets the rhythm, though that may raise the bar so high that I can't complete a piece. The only way to know is by trying to do it.
Then in your version, the second verse has a different meaning. The tagline could be changed to, "Tax receipts thinning," which would get closer to the original meaning and keep your rhythm. But to me it would be less clear we're still talking about the Reagan era.
When I'm making one of these, the process is something like - find an initial rhyme, here trickle down and clown, and then find an idea for the next verse, here clowns make you laugh so Arthur Laffer. In the rhythm choice I'm thinking about the second verse when I write the first. I thought about the tagline for the second verse when I wrote the first. I don't get much ahead of that however. In this particular case I got stuck after the third verse for a while and had to figure out how to segue from 1980 to the present.
Perhaps the process needs to be modified too.
Richard Reeves has a good brief history of this here: http://goo.gl/4GcJf
ReplyDelete