Nearly everyone knows how this is supposed to go. "Roses are red, violets are blue" is a formula so worn that the reader's mind finishes it before the eyes do, and "Play time" counts on that reflex. The first line starts the old machinery, then one swapped word makes it stutter. Roses are not red but black. Violets, in the next line, are black too. The poem's real subject is perception: what you see depends on who is looking, and the speaker is in for a surprise about that.
The answer comes last and arrives flat, as a punchline should: "I am a dog / I am color blind." The poem is a riddle told in reverse. The two false statements are delivered with total confidence, and only afterward do we learn who is making them. The speaker isn't lying or being gloomy. He is reporting honestly what he sees, and it happens to be wrong for everyone else. There is a second joke for readers who know the science. Dogs are popularly said to see only black and white, but they actually see a range of blues and yellows. By that standard even a dog would not find violets black, so the speaker's account of his own vision is slightly off, which suits a poem about getting things wrong.
The construction does a lot with very little. The original rhyme sets red against blue, two different colors held in balance. Here "black" is simply repeated, and the contrast collapses into sameness. The poem's palette shrinks to a single word, which is how a color-blind speaker might experience it. The rhyme the form promises is withheld as well. In the traditional version the second and fourth lines chime, but here "black" and "blind" only half-echo each other through their shared *bl-* opening, and "dog" rhymes with nothing at all. The ear is cheated just as the eye is.
The rhythm shifts along with the grammar. "Roses are black" and "Vilots are black" keep the bouncy, nursery-rhyme lilt, with a stress on the first syllable and another on the colour. Then the third-person flowers give way to a blunt "I am," and the lines go short and stiff. "I am a dog" is almost comically plain, a sentence with no decoration and nothing hidden. The move from "roses" to "I" is the move from the world the form describes to the creature doing the describing. The traditional last line turns to a "you" with a compliment, but here the "you" disappears, and nothing sweet is offered.
Roses and violets are the stock props of love verse, so blackening them carries a faint gothic or funereal shadow, and for two lines the reader may wonder whether the darkness is symbolic. The last two lines settle it. The black is only a limit of sight, and it turns the mood from mourning to comedy. The spelling "Vilots" is a small oddity. I can't say whether it is deliberate, but either way it echoes the theme, since a poem about seeing things slightly wrong contains a word slightly wrong. The author's name, which reads like a handle meaning "no one you care about," seems to fit the poem's shrug, though that is only an inference from the name itself.
The poem is significant because it shows how a shared template works. A parody can only succeed if the reader already carries the original in their head, so the poem honors the form and then breaks it. It leaves a neat idea behind: a perspective can be completely sincere and completely mistaken, and neither the dog nor the flowers need to change for that to be true. The title promises "play time," and the poem keeps that promise. It plays with a verse form everyone knows, and it makes the reader laugh by showing them the world through a dog's eyes.