Long notes at the bottom

The Once-ler wondered if his tale was a bore
But most of his hearing gone, perhaps the boy'd snored
He looked and saw the lad, still attentive
He vaguely wondered of the boy's incentive
To listen to his story, but he hushed
And made sure to not have his story rushed

The boy, however, had begun to cough
The Once-ler waved him off with a scoff
「Come tomorrow,」he advised to the boy
「Why can't I stay?」The boy sat, like a ploy
To stay longer, but another cough came
And Once-ler didn't want the boy to be lame
「Go away...」He said. 「Come another day,
Lest you lose your breath」That was all he had to say

He heard the boy walk back to his own town
He had the urge to rush the boy back around
Alone he'd been in his Lerkim so dreary,
Where the sour winds blew so eerily
Sixty-six years, he'd stayed in this place
Never seeing a warm, friendly face
He'd look through his boarded window
Looked to the town didn't care to know
That the world outside was filthy and dark
With nothing to break the landscape so stark

Whamp! came the whamping noise he knew well
He looked to the table where meals always fell
A noctivagous thing left food in pail
He'd eat and think 「For the want of a nail」
He never questioned from where it had come
He only asked it never come to his home
The Once-ler thanked the thing he'd never meet,
Took off his gloves, and began to eat

He thought of the Lorax, strange little fae
And of all of the fun things they did those days
They'd swum with the fish, played in the shade
With the Bar-ba-loots and Swans; oh, how they'd played!

With the thoughts of Thneeds out of his mind,
The Once-ler found the Lorax rather kind
He'd feed the baby animals, keep them safe
And the Once-ler, too, a proud, young waif
「What's it like in this Green-ville?」 the Lorax inquired.
「Well, people run on sugar and end up tired,
They run and don't stop, like the world's at its end
And you don't matter at all, lest you can buy your friends.」
The Once-ler thought of his family
「But not everyone's bad. No, not really.
Some people are mean but mean very well,
Like my mother. She'll be proud if I sell.」
The Lorax grew pensive and looked up to the man
The Once-ler walked to his books「Ever read a diwan?」

He showed the sprite stories his mother had gotten
Unlike other things, it'd not been boughten
The first present he remembered his mother getting
Back when his behavior wasn't so upsetting
When he would stay quiet, away in his room
As she would care for the twins inside of her womb
She was proud that her boy could just disappear
And not upset her friend that would often jeer
At the Once-ler that was still very small
And could hardly remember his father at all

The poems entertained them for many hours,
The air only scented with the smell of flowers
The Lorax heard of the beauty of roses,
And then to the Once-ler, he proposes
「You can stay here to live, if you want
If you honor your promise and keep this journey, a jaunt」
The Once-ler, stopping his turning of a page,
Felt their friendship had reached a new age

He'd do his best to be an ascetic
And to pay heed to the Lorax's homiletic
Words and keep peace with the Valley
Little did he know, it'd lead to their finale

Notes:

*"Sixty-eight years, he'd stayed in this place" - 1948 is the year in which commercially-made marshmallows were developed. Adding the time it would take for the entire Valley to be void of trees and seeds, being about four years, this leads me to having the Once-ler be 23 at the time of his arrival to the Valley. Currently in story, he'd be 89, which is logical with the way he talks to Ted about the younger generation in the movie. "The Lorax" was published in 1971, the same year when Starbucks was founded, making the random Starbucks references in the film chronologically accurate.

*「For the want of a nail」 - A reference to the proverbial rhyme that shows small actions leading to large consequences

*Greenville was the original name of Thneedville before the product's commercial success.

*The Once-ler seems to be very well educated for a young man. Growing up on a farm does not equate to financial security in education. It would have been around $6000 for the Once-ler to go to a four-year university. However, he already has clear grasps of economics, several sciences, engineering and electronics, financial and business management, and politics. Considering that they run a farm, a business in which most of the income goes back into supplies and plants, the Once-ler's family is not likely to be able to pay (or care) to send him to school. Hence, I give him a collection of diwan poems, Arabic and Persian poems, which emphasized several relationships between allegorical symbols. The one referred to here is that of the Nightingale and the Rose, the lover and the beloved.

*Homilectic - Relating to a homily or sermon