Is this blade sharp enough to use on a friend?

I didn't do a syllable count. I suppose I must have unconsciously incorporated the pause (from the break) into the first line of the last stanza. The shorter lines of that stanza WERE a deliberate choice. I did this one at a coffeehouse once, and it rolled off easily. Line 11, though, is not doing well. You are not the first to find it a stumblesome construction. It makes sense to me--but that doesn't make it work in a poem. In the oral/aural venue it slips by most; in the written form it doesn't slip by many. Heard speech gets hammered into some kind of intelligible shape on the fly by the listener, I guess; written words remain on the page, annoyingly ungrammatical--and a constant distraction to a careful reader. I'll have to do something about it, eventually, for this cause: I don't like coffeehouse poetry readings, I discovered. You find there too damn many poets--135% of whom think they're Charles Bukowski--who read their own words written in their own hand awkwardly, like children still struggling with the intricacies of "One Fish, Two Fish, Red Fish, Blue Fish". It's embarrassing to watch, and tedious to listen to. (Except when I'm up, of course.) The point of this paragraph is that I won't be doing any more recitations than I have to for the sake of being part of oral tradition, so I must attend to the problems of the written poem more carefully than I have done hitherto. The Problem of Line Eleven should be resolvable. Heck, all I need is an iambic pentametric ending with an '-an-rhyme.' But--lazy lout, I--suggestions for line eleven are welcome.