Sing Song Sans Sense

What a rotten mental day, sing-song verses never stopping, rapping, rapping, rapping, never stopping-- inside my noggin and driving me nuts.  Yuck.

Actually, it wasn't such a bad day most of the day.  I got up, lit my pipe, had coffee, found my feet, stood poised over my notebook...  Nothing.  Okay, so it's going to be a blob day.  Such days happen.  I read a lot, did diddle work that needed to be diddled done, and in the evening went out for my walk along the river.  I had missed several days.  Fall had advanced.  It was splendid.  Walking back to my truck in the dark this line came to mind: "The rough Fall foliage / of mild late Autumn".  Not bad.  No poem behind it, but not a bad line.  Then this:

Of immense value, this reawakened life:
New blood, new heart, in time new mind...
But of what nature and continuance uncertain.

Not bad.  It might in fact be something that could be connected to the first line.  Conceptually the idea would be that the new life was coming in the Fall, just as life was dying, rather than in the Spring, when new life would be forming.  The oddity of that backwards imaging would create an automatic tension...  Whatever.  I got in my truck and drove home.  That's when I read an odd letter from a friend who had excitedly just discovered that government can make money by severely taxing the rich.  He seemed to be bouncing.  That's when I wrote my own odd reply:

My, you sure do have the envious heart of the thief.  Every thief is pure in heart, you understand, their motives only the best.  They rather love themselves, you understand, they take only from those who have more than they need... But break into a home, tax the rich... a thief is a thief is a thief.

And that's when I realized the sing-song had hit.  It continued about two hours, and man, did I write a lot of really really bad verse.

Moral:  Verse is not poetry.  Poetry is perception, expressed in verse, in some form.  Or as I've otherwise written: "Poetry is perception, a thing perceived in such a way as not to be expressible in any way other than as a poem.  --Strong feeling, given gift, will finally be a poem."

Always the impulse has to be feeling, never meter, sound, or some intended form.  I wonder if anything good can come from the sing-song impulse?  I might write down one of the ones I did, later, and see if anything can be made of it.  --Still have that sing-song'y sense in my brain.  Yuck.
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A number of ideas came to mind while I was feeding my mice.  I sketched on them: many lines, many bad.  I may for the first time be "constructing" a poem, --what I talked of yesterday.  If it works out I'll put it down.  Tomorrow.  Not at all good yet; the concept is good.