honor: “you stumble where gods get lost”
*honor,
still the tattoo being drawn on my senses,
unresolved and demanding
solution or surrender,
acknowledging, that I am not poet enough
tho y’all keep diverting me with poem commissions,
half started but will freezer keep until Jacob’s angel and I
have wrestled this honor notion to the ground for good,
which means once and forever
Patti’s words distinctly heard:
“you stumble where gods get lost”
and that’s what the poetry is for,
to word wrestle until the resolution revelation shines
and someone cries out uncle, father, son, are we not all
samed and shamed when we wrestle with honor*
will you know honor when it presents itself?
a man keeps his word and another honors them both
with a monthly sum that says friendship is a promise kept
a father texts to a son in trouble “got your back” that elicits
a return verse of “I love you;”. that’s love, not honor cause someone remembers their immigrant father’s hell going slowly by and this poem and that memory revived, that’s honor
(goddamn tears on my phone screen, a bloody pain @6:53am
on sabbath morn; no body invited the interlopers; not me anyway)
*honor is not a parade or not the kind on my mind today: the honor that gets you medaled that’s all about brotherhood,
that’s a different kind of honor I understand but not what I’m
about right wright write now
looking for small acts, small doses, nearly invisible to the naked
eye, indeed, ya need a scrunched up squint to detect the honor that I need so desperately seek to theorem proof that,
even I got some
one of you wrote me, I am nothing.
one of you wrote me,
that they are all busted up on the boulevard of broken dreams.
trusting a stranger thru his crazier poems with depreciation and overwhelming sadnesses,
is that honor?
my rsvp (how could I not), is that honor?
honor sought in the small necessities which are more important than small kindnesses wrought from love: those come easy natural
necessary necessity, the word itself bleeds pressure on the soul; but i don’t mean paying your bills, burying your parents and such stuff;*
honor is in the unnecessary: where actions defeat uncertainty, honor is stepping up when no one calls out need
honor is the first step the hand extended and the concomitant
electric shock that traverses two hands in a shake that obviates
unnecessary words
like thank you
which why gods stumble, get lost, they only get praise conferred
but honor belongs only to us humans,
to give honor.
that’s power gods don’t got,
why they oft get lost
so thank you for staying with me this far,
you honor me by listening to an old man
seizing up when his mind asks him direct
did you live with honor,
and tho the summing up s’ain’t over,
(lol laughing, at the ain’t autocorrect),
at least now I know what to count,
what counts,
doing the unnecessary unasked
in small ways, a quieter doing good,
honor needs two and starts when you say hey
hey you...
*7:36am Saturnday 2+10+18
Shabbat Shekalim
writ without disguise*