We are time Beings! You cannot begin to comprehend a human individual if you limit yourself to studying a fixed moment in their life. Everything is in a hopeful flux; that is why the life is possible…

Something unusual happened yesterday. I cried.
Wrong verb, actually. I teared up with unexplained spilling emotion.
And it kept going…
It was too different, too direct, too “in another language”, for me to dispel or even grasp by thinking about it.
Afterwards I thought, shouldn’t I maybe write something around this?
A WordPress post?
But how could I ever do it justice, no matter how okay my skills?
Then it came to me… I’ll just write it down to her.
She’ll know how to receive it, how to let me go thru the exercise of exhaling it.

My son had walked by — sometimes he wanders in looking for some new input.
Vaguely.
Like — I’m almost a teenager now; where is this going, our relationship? What wisdom have you?

I thought a second, then I asked him:
Do you know what poetry is? Tell me what you think poetry is.

Comical, unsurprising mostly, negative reactions, yukk, why did I walk past here?
I laughed and said no it is a serious question… what do you think it -is-, really? Describe it.
Come sit by me a few minutes.
He complied — he knew our sitdowns usually yield something good.
He offered a few more minimal characterizations then I stopped him.

I said poetry is a way of showing that language is something more, alot more, than we usually think it is.

I asked for and gave him some examples of what he ‘talks’ about usually, and how.
Laughing with friends online, shouting observations and enthusiasms on the ball court, asking for some food.

He was relaxed now, so I told him, when he was 4 or 5 I wrote a love poem.
About him, and about childhood.
And I told him how it was a way for me to say things language can’t usually say, so I had to work at it.
But it worked. And I was going to prove it by reading it to him.
I told him don’t worry, it is pretty short, and only will take a few minutes.
And it even has some mention of sports in it.

Then I had to grab my phone and find it on WP, and remember the title, and so on…
I found it, and told him how it was called 23 Ute cause that is where I lived,
my street address, when I was about from ages 5 to 12.
He liked that tidbit of info.
Then I started to read slowly.
I never read my stuff aloud, so it felt monumental in a strange way, hearing it physically.

By about ten lines in my voice was getting harder to control and modulate fluently.
And my eyes were damp.
Isn’t it odd that emotions express as liquids?
But he kept listening, and had zero impatience.
So I kept going — just permitting myself lengthy pauses when needed.
Pauses not in the usual places, diction-wise.
They were pauses in emotion-wise places.

I knew some words would be a challenge for him.
But he got them close enough, cause I went slow and with feeling.

And at the end I was quiet.
Longer than any of the emotion pauses.

And then he said, wow, that was pretty good.
He only said that.
But the emotion space lasted a few more moments.

Then I smiled and looked at him through the wetness,
after grabbing a tissue to blow my nose.

See how we feel now?
That’s what poetry is, sweetboy.
That’s what poetry is.

_______RS

Note : For the curious, the love poem in question was this.

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