The Tress of Paper is a ribald poetic form intended to make an apology concerning a specific wilderness region, originating in The Responsible Empires. The rules of the form are applied by poets to produce individual poems which can be recited. The poem is three couplets. Use of consonance and metaphor is characteristic of the form. Forms of parallelism are common throughout the poem, in that certain lines often share an underlying meaning and they have similar grammatical structures. The ending of each line of the poem shares the same rhyme. The second line of each couplet is required to maintain the phrasing of the first line. The second line of each couplet uses the same placement of allusions as the first line. The second line of each couplet presents a different view of the subject of the first line.