Resistance.

So it's National Poetry Month. As has become a tradition, Dr. Write and I plan to post a poem a day, with some generosity in terms of how "poem" and "day" (and probably "a," if we're being honest) are defined. As Dr. Write says of our project, "We do this by lowering our standards." We'll post them here and here--there's a collaborative site where anyone can sign up and post a poem a day.

Along with this collaborative, there's a list of prompts furnished by the Community Writing Center. This seems like it should be a gift, a veritable hoard of seeds out of which to grow a garden, right? (Garden of poems. You're going to have to try to keep up.)

The first prompt, today's: write a poem about a joke.

Here are the things I did before I gave up and wrote a poem about the weather and a piece of jewelry and, like, mutability--regular poet stuff:

1. Looked up "the best jokes." (I'm not kidding. I did not even feel shame about it.)
2. Considered what is a joke. What are the elements of jokes? What has to go into a joke to make it a joke? (While I was considering this, I ran across an epic set of tweets about jokes from Patton Oswalt, so that was a small reward.)
3. Considered what things are joke-adjacent. Riddles, for instance. Puns.
4. Got a temporary crown put on my broken tooth.
5. Made dinner.
6. Graded some papers.
7. Asked myself why I was letting that prompt boss me around.

And then I wrote this poem.

Me and the prompts are going to have to work something out, I guess.