Gentle Dream

First lesson of meter is accented and unaccented syllables, or down-beats and up-beats, or strong and weak, whatever you want to call them.  The accent/ up-beat/ strong stress is the DUM part of a da-DUM.  In strict meter, like iambic pentameter, you want to keep both strong and weak stresses to a regular pattern but if we're not being strict (and today I'd rather not) then the best thing to remember is that you should always keep the number of strong stresses in a rhyming poem to a pattern, so that your rhymes fall in the right places and they're not wasted.

For example, take your first two lines and compare yours:

I realized the truth, as it slipped past in the stream
gently persuading, turning phrases like a dream

with this:

I realized the truth, as it slipped past in the stream
It was gently persuading, turning phrases like a dream
 

Both have four strong stresses per line but the second softens it with a couple of extra syllables so that when you read it out loud (as is always a good idea) it takes about the same time and nothing is stretched or hurried. 

By strong stresses I mean it is read like this:

i rea-LIZED the TRUTH, as it SLIPPED past in the STREAM
it was GENTly perSUADing, turning PHRASES like a DREAM

Since you start with soft/weakly stressed syllables and end with strong ones, it's best to continue in that pattern.  Your next line, however, has a lot of words crowding it out and doesn't "scan" nicely.  (Scanning, or scansion, is poetry-speak for how it looks when you break it down into sound patterns).  It will take a while but you'll get the hang of choosing the best word for the pattern -- and there's ALWAYS an alternative, it just takes some discipline.  A lot of the criticism of rhyming poetry is that it's too restrictive and doesn't allow creative freedom -- this is basically bollocks from a bunch of lazy folk who've only ever tried free verse.  Rhyme can often take your poem in directions you weren't at first expecting, but if you practise enough you'll realise that YOU are in control, not the poem. 

It does take practise though.  If you've only been writing poetry for a few months, take heart -- I've been doing this for twenty years or more and I've still got plenty of things to learn, with loads of room for improvement!