Two friends diverged in a yelling mood
And sorry I could not keep them both
And still maintain one attitude,
I scrolled down through one’s page, and viewed
Some green and gold of writing growth.
Then saw the other was just as good,
With maybe even a better claim
Because so well misunderstood
Within the writing neighborhood,
Though as for that they’re much the same.
And each that morning equally laid
The blame upon the other’s back.
I had no way to tell who’d made
The first or worst move; I’m afraid
I have no feel for clique or claque.
Online I have too many friends
To keep good track, so, nothing loath
To making enemies or ends
Where there are no real dividends,
I shook my head – and blocked them both.
*****
Marcus Bales writes: “Most of the fraught relationships online are due to people not being able to write very well on one end, or read very well on the other. Stuff that in in-person conversation would go completely unnoticed is taken up as deliberate slighting. Mostly its merely awkward phrasing, or one interlocutor is already two comments past when the reply to the third interaction scrolls by and it’s misinterpreted as an instant response to the most recent reply when it was really intended to answer something two or three comments back.
“Now in the case of political disagreements where the polarized sides are already firmly established and one side or the other or both are determined to fight that’s a whole other thing. There it’s got nothing to do with how well or ill something is read or written and everything to do with the sport of online woofing.
“It’s one of those things where over the years people block and get blocked and complain to their friends about either end of it and then it all goes away pretty fast as the opportunity to be triggered — again at either end — fades with the blocking.”
(The original poem on which this parody is based, for those not familiar with it, is Robert Frost’s ‘The Road Not Taken‘. – RHL)
Not much is known about Marcus Bales except that he lives and works in Cleveland, Ohio, and that his work has not been published in Poetry or The New Yorker. However his ‘51 Poems‘ is available from Amazon. He has been published in several of the Potcake Chapbooks (‘Form in Formless Times’).
Photo: “Yotsuba & Tech Support” by Liberty Photos is licensed under CC BY-NC 2.0.
Form in Formless Times 
Another bravura performance, homie!!! Don’ block me!~
I get from your verse the same vibe I get from Pope, of yore.
Thanks for the entertainment and exercise!
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But is it a parody? The definition of a parody is a work imitating a writer’s style and content, for comic and/or critical effect.
This poem references Frost’s title and opening, and uses his stanza form, but does not (to me at least) to be making any comment (humorous, critical or otherwise) on Frost or his way of writing poetry. It goes on by way of humblebrags (‘I’m afraid/ I have no feel for clique or claque.’ and ‘I have too many friends’) to a very un-Frostian ending. So un-Frostian, that the work cannot really even be considered a pastiche. (For a good Frost parody, I’d recommend ‘Mr Frost goes South to Boston’ by Firman Houghton, found in Dwight Macdonald’s parody anthology.)
I’ve seen several poems like this on internet light verse forums, that claim to be parodies because they reference more famous works, usually in their opening lines. But where actual parodies stand in a combative relationship with the original, poems like this are no more than parasitical – using a well-known original just to draw our attention to a poem that wouldn’t be very interesting without the reference.
But these days I may be in a minority hoping that a parody might be an intelligent critique. I googled ‘Robert Frost parody’ and was rewarded with the offer of dozens of parasitic imitations even weaker than this one.
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Thanks, that’s an interesting comment in itself on parody, and I’m mulling it over. And it’s particularly interesting because of it being focused on that oddball Frost poem “that everyone loves and everyone gets wrong”. The essay at https://poets.org/text/road-not-taken-poem-everyone-loves-and-everyone-gets-wrong gives its intriguing backstory.
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