Children's poetry is linguistic subjugation.

Occasionally (very occasionally), I catch myself reading poetry to Josephine in a rare (very rare) moment of misguided, foolhardy tenderness. (I wanted to make sure y'all know that so I get proper credit for my reformed-savage sensitivity.)

Unfortunately, I'm all too frequently caught off-guard by the language gestapo. Sometimes it's stodgy Brits of the Ox-bridge mould applying end rhyme that runs counter to modern American diction. As I approach the end of the line, a surprising word emerges and I realize lyrical dexterity will be required to keep my daughter in a sing-song trance. . . my voice cranes and lilts to make the words match, but it usually just wobbles out sounding like some wavering nordic mutation (at best). At worst, it becomes absolutely preposterous and leaves a look of shame and disgrace on Josephine's face.

The latest offense came at the hands of my own countryman -- from Dr. Seuss, a New Englander:

"Who is this pet?
Say! He is wet.
You never yet met a pet, I bet
As wet as they let this wet pet get."

To be fair, Dr. Seuss is a family favorite, so I'm cautious in challenging him so openly. But since this poem was copyrighted in 2005 by Random House's "Dr. Seuss Enterprises" (rather than Dr. Seuss himself, who died in the 90s), I suspect I'm actually confronting a ghostwriter who's upholding the brand of the Dr. Seuss franchise for the benefit of the publisher and to earn prodigious loyalties for heirs. Besides, I'm not convinced it has the stylistic fingerprints of a Dr. Seuss poem that had been waiting to be published posthumously.

When I read the four simple lines quoted above, my ears find a rhyme in the words pet, wet, yet, met, bet -- to my aural interpretation, at least, they all sound exactly how they look. (Other people might hear something more poly-syllabic coming from my mouth: "Pehyat -- wehyat -- yehyat -- mehyat -- behyat," but even with the patent East Texas intonation, the effect is the same: each subsequent word crystallizes into tidy alignment.) Where I get tripped up is at the very end, with the word "get." I hear and speak "giht," which is employing a completely different vowel and is probably also a little more truncated than the drawl affected in the other words. Unless I contort my expression in the manner described above, any direct, straightforward rhyme is lost in my accent.

This always leaves me with a decision to make in a matter of milliseconds: do I submit to this egregious, patronizing assault on my native dialect, or do I defy convention and leave a bitter, gnawing buzz in our two pairs of ears as the rhyme falls flat? As a proud forebearer of regional idiosyncracies, indigenous eccentricities, and the like, I'm hoping to manually weld my daughter's synapses in as heavy-handed a way as possible, so I of course opt to disobey the mono-cultural tyranny, to deconstruct the exogenous, pseudo-colonial order and to honor local authenticity. And so on -- blah, blah, blah.

From here on out, Josephine and I will be limiting ourselves to brainy Southern poets (it might be difficult to draw the circle more narrowly and find cerebral Central/East Texas literati, but I'd be happy to be proven wrong on that count) or the free-form wordsmiths who are much less likely to meddle in the phonetic autonomy we proudly exercise. Any good suggestions, particularly for the former?