I quite like this, Richard, it seems a skillful combination of the light and the heavy—it has all the quick-moving rhythms of light verse, and yet the content shades into satirical darkness—a marriage I am quite fond of. Most of all, in its broad-ranging detail it seems a very exact portrait, appealing to both my senses and to my mind, placing eyes-and-ears and brain right there. I also enjoy the lineation and the rhyme-scheme: breaking up the long rhyming couplet into four lines with only two of the lines rhyming, well, it gives you a chance to pack in the detail and yet still keep the rhyme's forward momentum. Were the lines simply longer, they might feel over-stuffed and the rhymes might seem too insistent. There is something about the present layout that yields the best of both worlds: both freedom and constraint.
Bravo!
Nemo
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