Rhythm, Rhyme and Meter

Rhythm, Rhyme and Meter, I shall miss you when you’re gone
Without any structure, how can poets carry on?
Some self-indulgent, babbling hack is an awful bore
Who can wonder why folks do not listen anymore?

Rhythm, Rhyme and Meter,  you have raised me from a child
If not for all your tutelage, my poems would run wild
Lacking any discipline, they’d ramble on, or worse
I’d be producing doggerel some people call “free verse.”

Rhythm, Rhyme and Meter, why have most deserted you?
To claim “poetic license” new age writers now eschew
The priceless origins of lyric lore, the very rules
The masters handed down to us from literary schools.

Rhythm, Rhyme and Meter, you are obsolete, I’m told
Restricted to the very young, or to the very old
But I fall somewhere in between, so I have no excuse
I’d rather hear some Ogden Nash, or good old Dr. Seuss.