My four-year-old son seems to be coming out with a joke a day at the moment. And his latest offering, in particular, has given me pause for thought.

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Question: Why did the banana go to the doctor's?
Answer: Because he wasn't peeling very well!

As jokes go, it's fairly lame but for the first time it made me think about how close cracking jokes comes to writing poetry. Like poetry, all of my son's jokes revolve around dual meanings, rhymes, homonyms, homophones, conotations, contexts and expectations. He is gradually developing a sense of what is and isn't a verbal joke but doesn't fully understand how/why many jokes work yet. (Sometimes he tries to make up his own versions based on the jokes he has learnt. But often he only understands the one meaning of the joke. He knows it is funny, but not why, and therefore his versions fail to make one laugh except at the fact that he thinks it is funny.) This is useful for me however because it makes me look at how the jokes work and therefore how the language (and poetry) works.

Anyway enough abstract wittering for today! Here are a few more cinquains I wrote for the writelink cinquain game:

Melted
silence shimmies
in, shivering for sun
as curtains open up the day's
new sky.