I'm glad to have you over!
And writing stories with a limited vocabulary range is an interesting and worthwhile endeavour. I suffer from the opposite condition, where I normally sprinkle in words that I like, which tend to be quite expensive and expansive, heh.
I like how the poem you posted turned out. Good job :)
Thanks! I am working on making a custom dictionary for OpenOffice so that I don't have to try to remember which 1,000 lemma I am using. I think that there is a real need for interesting, simple-to-read stuff for ESL learners. I know that I can take care of the latter, but hopefully I can write things that are interesting even with a limited vocab range.