Lyrics in Progress

I was busy today!

you beat up your wife when you felt like it
you bullied, threatened, abused her
at last she broke out after one of your fits
to escape from opression and torture

you pestered your brother-in-law to find out
where your wife might have fled and be hiding
as he refused to reveal her whereabouts
you just seized him to get him confiding

and you punched him hard because you knew he knew
you broke his nose, tore his nails, yet still
he'd not said a word when he died off on you
though you had never intended to kill

by rule of thumb
a severed thumb stickin' out
will mean thumbs down
in the end for you

this tiny part
of your victim's corpse
makes your whole home town
point a finger at you

you butchered your victim quite thoroughly
and disposed of your slaughterhouse waste
who'd have thought that a crow eventually
would find a thumb to her taste

yet lose her precious prey in mid-air
while being captured on CCTV
landing right on a crowded public square
giving voice to a silent man's plea

a severed thumb providing the only proof
of what the police had already conjectured
you've got no choice to stand aloof
or hold the alibi you'd manufactured

by rule of thumb
a severed thumb stickin' out
will mean thumbs down
in the end for you

this tiny part
of your victim's corpse
makes your whole home town
point a finger at you

I couldn't quite keep up a consistent meter, but it works in my mind. I'm also not too happy with having three verses before the first chorus, but it didn't seem a viable option to separate the third verse from the second. In the end I stuck to the same structure in the second part. I should possibly add a short bridge and repeat the chorus once more.

My 'little helpers' this time were:

- the Penguin Rhyming Dictionary

- RhymeZone

- dict.cc

- the Oxford Advanced Learners Dictionary

- and Webster's English Thesaurus (not much help, actually)

As you may have noted I use rhyming dictionaries a lot. This is how I work:

I put down new lines of text that more or less fit the meter that sort of seems to develop automatically after having created the first two or three lines. Next I try to find matching rhymes for the last syllable(s). After writing "... yet lose her precious prey in mid-air" I came up with "public square" by myself. But after noting "a severed thumb providing the only proof" I got stuck. So I looked up rhymes for 'proof' to find 'roof' or 'aloof'. Since 'aloof' might somehow be fitted in I checked dict.cc for proper phrases discovering 'to stand aloof'. Obviously, I have to scrap concepts or lines when not even a useful 'near' rhyme comes up.