Nobody tells you what to do with someone else's love once it has been put in your hands, and that is the problem the speaker of "in all honesty" circles for twelve short lines. The title lies lowercase between guillemets and sounds like the phrase people use just before an awkward admission. The first line obliges: "I don't know what to do with your love." It is a confession of helplessness, not rejection. Love is treated as an object, something given that has weight and needs a place to go.
The speaker's first answer is a gardener's: "Plant it somewhere where the grass / Meets / The earth." The line break leaves "Meets" alone, so the meeting happens in a gap on the page. Then the grass "breaks into a run," a small piece of personification that turns a lawn into a sprinter. The love is imagined not as something that stays where it is put but as something that bolts across the land until it "arrives in our back yard." The shift from "your" to "our" is the quietest and most important move in the poem. The love is carried home to a place that is shared, or was, or was hoped to be. The text does not say which.
Then comes "Maby?", stranded on its own line. Whether the spelling is a slip or a choice, it works as a stammer. The speaker interrupts their own tidy fantasy of planting with doubt, and the question mark shows that the poem does not fully trust its solution. The next image is softer and sadder. Dew "Drops" (again the key word sits alone, so it falls down the page) onto the porch "as though they were / Tears / Instead of rain." Dew is a gentle, early-morning kind of moisture, so the yard seems to cry quietly. "Instead of rain" carries a practical bitterness: a garden needs rain, and tears will not make anything grow. The line also ends without punctuation and spills straight into the questions, as if the speaker has no time to recover.
The poem has no rhyme and no steady metre. Its rhythm comes entirely from its breaks. Four single-word lines, "Meets," "Maby?," "Drops," and "Tears," act as stumbles or held breaths, and each one enacts its meaning: a meeting, a hesitation, a fall, a breaking. The longer lines around them run on in the unpolished way of someone thinking aloud. Even the sound is modest. The soft d and f of "dew / Drops / Falling" slow the mood, while the harder "breaks" and "back yard" give the running grass a little momentum.
The last three lines turn to questions, and the pattern "Do I… Do I…" makes them feel like a person pacing. "Do I feed it? Treat it hungry?" bends the grammar. It could mean treat the love as if it were hungry, or keep it hungry. Either way, love becomes a creature that must be fed or starved. Then comes the strangest line: "Do I can it your name?" Here "can" suggests preserving, as with fruit sealed in a jar for winter. It also carries the slang sense of getting rid of something. The sentence is missing a word (can it *with* your name? *under* your name?), so it never quite completes, and the broken grammar mirrors the speaker's broken certainty. The options move from letting love grow, to nourishing it, to storing it or shutting it away.
What makes the poem worth reading is how ordinary its vocabulary is. There are no grand declarations, only grass, a porch, a back yard, and the homely work of canning. Love appears as a chore, a responsibility, and a possible gift all at once. Judging by the text alone, we cannot know who "you" is or what has happened between the two people, and that openness lets readers bring their own situation to it. Anyone who has been offered more feeling than they knew how to handle will recognise the speaker.
The poem also earns its title. The honest thing, it suggests, is not a neat decision but the admission of not knowing. It ends on a question with no answer, and it trusts the reader to sit in that uncertainty.