Rick, you just hit the nail on the head. Along with the ability to memorize things that rhyme, many of us have the ability to punt when that line evaporates just as you sing the one before it. Can't think how many times I plugged in something close that rhymes, and then failed to return to the original.

Pete's words about the snapshot of a bird in flight not being the bird... Seems to me that songs are onlysongs when they are sung... just for that length of time that they are carried from the voice to the ear. The flytracks on the stripes on the paper -- that's shorthand to aid the memory, but it isn't the sound.

Did I say it was BAD, Joe??? I don't think so. I just said it had moved a ways from the version I heard. It is, after all, about making a song your own. I just said that Catspaw shouldn't be asking absolution from another sinner as bad as he.
(Let he without sin among us cast the first shoe.)
Blessings,
Barbara