You broke my funny bone
and drew a smiley on the cast
a ductile material
will continue to deform
until it ruptures
You broke my funny bone
its sharp edges piercing bodily structure
severing a piece of sympathetic trunk
bodies with cracks
suffer plain problems of elasticity
a boundary value problem
with no non-trivial solutions
You broke my funny bone
the x-rays lured a doctors’ crowd
a complicated fracture, they diagnosed
then chuckled, snickered, laughed out loud
Functionally stable fixation – they made a cast
You drew your smiley on it even before it set
: Fracture strength
the stress at which a specimen fails
via fracture
You broke my funny bone
it healed
but it hurts
each time I laugh
This poem was born out of the prompt at napowrimo.net, though you might not be able to tell. This was our challenge: “Today, we’d like to challenge you to write a poem that incorporates homophones, homographs, and homonyms, or otherwise makes productive use of English’s ridiculously complex spelling rules and opportunities for mis-hearings and mis-readings.
My first thought was that I felt unable to write something funny – which brought me the opening line. From there I wanted to play with the double meaning of fracture, being both a physical thing that happens to a bone, and a mathematical thing that happens to a number – Or that’s what I thought. I’ve learned it can happen to a plane, which brought me one homophone for the poem.
My #NaPoWriMo day 14 was written with the help of http://www.encyclopediaofmath.org and Wikipedia. I’ve also learned what a homograph attack is and how I can prevent falling for one: https://inspiredelearning.com/blog/avoid-falling-homograph-attack/.

Poem and drawing by Angela van Son