"Seven bums and fourteen legs,
a brazen ecstasy which begs
the question some of us are asking -
is Peter Goulding multi-tasking?"

Martin Parker, Editor, Lighten Up Online

Sunday, November 14, 2010

Two roads a-forkin'

A very interesting prompt from Karen this week all to do with coming to a crossroads or a fork and which way do you go.
My major decision to get a ticket was whether to go for some serious poetry or the cheap laugh...

The forking road

(after Robert Frost)*

Upon this road, I now have an emergency –
the paths divide, one left, the other, right.
A decision must be come to with some urgency
or else I might be here all forking night.

My spirits now are not in the ascendancy.
My feet are tired and heavy is my load.
It seems as though I always have a tendency
to miss the signposts on this forking road.

Evidently I’ve a strange deficiency
that means that I have no sense of direction.
It might well test my powers of self-sufficiency
if I should make the wrong forking selection.

The haste to choose, alas, smacks of indecency
but I’ve one forking rule when plagued by doubt.
Choose the road that’s travelled with more frequency –
the road less travelled often peters out.

* (I’ve always wanted to put ‘after’ after a title – it implies I’ve actually read somebody else’s poem.)

14 comments:

  1. Wonderful! I love your forking poem. It's forkingly perfect and so true.
    Thanks for your forking comment about the word dappled. I dislike that word too. It's such a ... oh I don't know... overdressed yet benign adjective. So I've grappled with dappled and rewritten the line - but still thinking about some better forking words to fill that dappled space.

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  2. Forkin great poem, twould be a bigger challenge to write a poem with "before" after the title

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  3. This is forking brilliant! You are such a clever fellow, aren't you? Ha ha! Love it! (Nice to have a bit of levity on the subject.)

    Kat

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  4. This is one wonderfully forking fun poem! I started smiling at the end of the first stanza, and I'm still smiling now. Your work is a delight!

    (Ooh! I just saw the comment about "dappled." I LOVE the word! Gerard Manley Hopkins did that to me!)

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  5. An ambition fulfilled! Knife like precision here with none of the lines being spoon fed, despite the humour being handed to us on a plate, you cunning old forker.

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  6. Love this! I went one further than Karen - I laughed out loud at the end of the first stanza. Startled poor Dr. M out of his revery.

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  7. Hi Cynthia - oh God, I didn't mean you to change anything!Other people love'dappled' - its just not for me.
    Niamh - yes, "before Seamus Heaney" kind of anticipating his next poem - its so crazy it might just work...

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  8. Hey, a cracker of a poem. Forking it all, just the way it should be.

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  9. Dappled makes me think of horses.

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  10. I loved the road this travelled - which ever one it was!

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  11. Really enjoyed it, great poem, made me smile lots.

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  12. Peter, glad you went for cheap humor. I am so impressed with the multi-syllabic words in your end rhymes. Just once I would like to sit there and watch you make up something like this.

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  13. Chris, be warned, watching me is not an enjoyable preoccupation! Many thanks for the kind words..

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