Shrinking Verse

An interesting form indeed: this one’s the Shrinking Verse. The more you let your ink pen bleed, the more, stanzas get terse. The opposite, I must concede, for sure, would be much worse. I can’t draw forth the words I need, an older poet’s curse. From eight to six to four to two, so goes the stanza’s count. Like run-off rain will often do, a trickle from a fount, and when you’ve pared to pairs, you’re through: time for the big dismount. The rhyming pattern does repeat; ’Tis just an ‘a’ and ‘b’. The ‘a’ line always has four feet; The ‘b’ line, only three. In truth, it’s not that much to ask, so I will not shrink from the task. ---------- The Shrinking Verse has a decreasing number of lines per stanza, typically 8/6/4/2, but you could start at 12 or 10 as well. The rhyme pattern, 8a:6b, repeats as many times as is needed for the stanza. The exception is that the final couplet is 8a:8a