Clive, I don't hear the virtual beat at all, any more than I see dancers freeze after each measure of a waltz. In fact, when I write or read trimeter, I find myself writing and hearing in units of twelve, much like hexameters with an internal rhyme at the caesura. Aha! you will say, Caesura! And caesurae I'm deeply familiar with by having done the Wulf. Do you hear a virtual beat at the end of every dimeter half line in Beowulf, thus making it virtual hexameter, rather than accentual tetrameter? I am baffled.
Terese, Bob's is a wonderful poem, but it ain't trimeter. Bob distinguishes between metrical and non-metrical poems in his Collected by the inclusion or omission of initial caps. There are a lot of lines in this poem which have four beats.
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