08-02-2012, 04:41 AM
Thanks for having such a good attitude toward editing 
I'm on a flying visit now, but I'll address the cliche thing -- yes, you can use them for effect, but it generally ought to be clear that's what you're doing. In this case, the meaning is not really inverted, more taken back to the origins of the phrase. There are ways to get around this. Punctuation is a wonderful thing to play with in poetry, for example if you had (and it might be tricky in this exact case, but just for the sake of my rambling, bear with me!):
stone: dead
The addition of the colon (or a full stop would have a similar effect) draws attention to the fact that you're fully aware of the phrase and it hasn't just slipped out in automatic writing. A line break would also work. Even stones, dead. You're still playing on that shared cultural knowledge of the cliche, but it doesn't get skipped over by the reader so they're forced to acknowledge the image.
On meter: it doesn't need to be regular and it doesn't need to conform to a set structure, but the most important thing to remember is to count the stresses so that your rhymes fall on a strong stress where they ought to. Again, it's all about not losing any elements of the poem -- remembering that you have a lot less to work with, word-count-wise, in a poem than in prose and every word absolutely has to belong.
(Does "clough" rhyme with "rough" or "toff" in your accent?)
I'm on a flying visit now, but I'll address the cliche thing -- yes, you can use them for effect, but it generally ought to be clear that's what you're doing. In this case, the meaning is not really inverted, more taken back to the origins of the phrase. There are ways to get around this. Punctuation is a wonderful thing to play with in poetry, for example if you had (and it might be tricky in this exact case, but just for the sake of my rambling, bear with me!):
stone: dead
The addition of the colon (or a full stop would have a similar effect) draws attention to the fact that you're fully aware of the phrase and it hasn't just slipped out in automatic writing. A line break would also work. Even stones, dead. You're still playing on that shared cultural knowledge of the cliche, but it doesn't get skipped over by the reader so they're forced to acknowledge the image.
On meter: it doesn't need to be regular and it doesn't need to conform to a set structure, but the most important thing to remember is to count the stresses so that your rhymes fall on a strong stress where they ought to. Again, it's all about not losing any elements of the poem -- remembering that you have a lot less to work with, word-count-wise, in a poem than in prose and every word absolutely has to belong.
(Does "clough" rhyme with "rough" or "toff" in your accent?)
It could be worse