Anyone who has promised to start properly tomorrow will recognise the situation in Dave Bonta's "Resolution". The poem takes that familiar moment and shrinks it to five unpunctuated couplets. The speaker's grand intention to take charge of his own body gets gentler with every stanza, until the poem ends with a snack. Its central idea is the gap between resolving to do something and doing it. The speaker never refuses to change. He just keeps finding reasons to be kind to himself first.
The opening line sets the tone: "I put off to another day / my hot body." The phrase "hot body" is deliberately slippery. It could mean a feverish, restless body, or one full of appetite and desire, or a body that has become an awkward subject the speaker would rather not face. "Put off" is slippery too. It means to postpone, but it can also mean to take something off, as one removes a coat, so the speaker seems to be both delaying his body and setting it aside like an object. Either way, the body is something he handles at arm's length rather than lives in.
That distance grows in the next two stanzas. The body "will require time to look / after it right", language we use for a houseplant, a pet or a child. Then comes the best image in the poem: "making a friend / out of an old acquaintance." The body, the one thing we cannot be separated from, is described as someone half-known, with whom a friendship has never quite got going. The joke is gentle but also a little sad. The line break after "look" lets us briefly read an instruction to simply look at the body, before "after it right" turns it into a phrase about care. That small pause suggests how much attention the speaker is willing to give and how little.
The form matches this hesitancy. The lines are short, mostly four to six syllables, and the couplets read like a mumbled thought rather than a declaration. There is no punctuation at all, so the poem is one loose sentence of dangling participles ("making", "intending", "not being") that never quite attach to a firm action. Nothing is ever stated with a full stop, which suits a speaker who avoids committing himself. There is no regular rhyme, but there is one quiet echo: "do" at the end of the fourth stanza returns as "two" in the last line. It lands the final joke with a tiny click, like a door shutting on the resolution.
That joke depends on the fourth stanza's odd phrasing: "intending not to do / anything suddenly." Resolutions usually promise action, such as running every morning or giving up sugar. Here the resolve is entirely negative, a plan to avoid doing anything abruptly. It sounds sensible, even wise, but it works as a loophole, because gradual change that never begins is still no change. Then the last couplet drops the pretence: "not being fit I eat / a cake or two." "Fit" is a pun worth noticing. It means physically in shape, but it also means suitable or ready, so the speaker is saying he is not in a state to start. His logic is perfectly circular. He is unfit, so he eats cake, and cake keeps him unfit. The casual "or two" is the final touch. It admits the real number is probably higher, and in doing so shows the speaker is honest about his dishonesty.
The title is the last piece of irony. "Resolution" suggests a New Year's vow, but it can also mean the settling of a conflict, and in the poem's own way it delivers both. The conflict between wanting to change and wanting comfort is settled, but in favour of comfort, and with no fuss.
What makes the poem worth reading is that it treats human weakness with humour rather than judgement. It does not lecture us about health or willpower. It lets a mild, self-aware voice show us how reasonable procrastination can sound, and how easily good intentions are absorbed by ordinary appetite. In a few dozen words it also hints at something larger: many of us spend our lives on uneasy terms with our own bodies, always meaning to get to know them better, later.