As always, thanks to Blnk Vrz who's an even better poetry critic than myself. To address your comments:
It's really inspired by Homeric verse where spondees can substitute for dactyls. I've found in English that dactyls, anapests and spondees all have a similar rhythmic "value" in term of stresses so I tend to call this varied Tetrameter even though it's somewhat Homeric in inspiration. I've also found you can even throw in iambs and trochees in and get away with it rhythmically. I think the "form" (if I can call it that) really offers a lot of possibilities and variations metrically while still retaining the same feel rhythmically. The extra beats are almost always in the form of spondees taking the place of dactyls or anapests; for example:
The withering world in the glass ponds and rivers
The aged paper hands of sinewy silver
Scans: -/--/--//-/- || -//-/-/--/-
Despite the variations I feel the that it all remains "on beat" and rhythmically pleasing even though the stresses are coming in different places. I stretch this occasionally an intentionally stretch it to its breaking point for the penultimate line for effect.
That was also intentional. I posted another poem even more loosely in this style called "Dementia Couplets" (you can read it
here) that I almost composed completely improvisationally but I found the problem was that the constant tetrameter lines just endlessly ran on into the next no matter how I tried to break the stanzas up. So when I came up with that repeating line for this piece I thought I had solved the problem in how it provides a "pause". Plus I tried to make the variations relevant to the idea being expressed in any given stanza. So if it does make it pause that's by intent. Whether it works or not is up to each individual reader (I thought it did, though I'm not quite sure I'm happy with the effect I was able to achieve with the repetition).