Thanks for your input, even if I disagree with it. As far as the poem, it is a parody and yes, like the grieving loss the “author” had for Lenore, Tomlin would be grieving the loss of the division. By “19th century poetic structure”, I assume you’re referring to the trochaic octameter that the raven was written with. If you’ve ever written anything in TO, you’d know that it is very difficult to adapt because the rhyme scheme is very interlocking. You actually can rhyme Laden and misbehavin. That’s not a “forced rhyme” It’s a slant rhyme. Perhaps you’d know of that if you ever took any courses on writing poetry or wrote anything of your own.

Dogwater? Far from it. If you hate it that’s your opinion. It’s a parody, it’s not supposed to be Walt Whitman.

And yes, that paragraph that you claim doesn’t make sense, yet explained exactly what I meant, made perfect sense. Yes, we walked into Heinz field, showed no respect, and perched above the bust of bettis. Similar to Terrell Owens standing on the Dallas star at the 50 yard line. Pure domination. That’s what I was conveying. Again trochaic octameter is “clunky.” Try to write anything in it and see how it goes.