See the Words

See the Words

(“Lord, in the morning you hear my voice. In the morning I lay it all out before you.  Then I wait expectantly.” Psalm 5:3)

What if we could see the words, the syllables come rushing
like pellets from an air gun. What if their velocity measured
the force, the love, the grace, the clear-throated and the hoarse.
And, what if their colors measured a story’s truth, like halo’s
shine, like glory’s arc of purity. And false words fell under
the weight of colors so dark there remained little brightness
to measure at all.

Imagine each syllable of every word, each syllable’s letter
flying above a crowd of mouths intersecting and reflecting until
all we have seen is as much joy as a flock of monarchs spiraling
in joyful colors and buzz. Or, depending on what you had heard,
what you observed,
the flight is as annoying as a swarm of mosquitoes in high-pitched
drone?

We would see no better than we hear, even though the words appear
color-coded and hover eye-level. We might still dissect the syllables
in our insistence that each hue has an exact correlation and my
reaction
equals (without fraction)
the speaker’s meaning, as if a caption was written
in italics and English and definitions’ shades remain
unchanged over the arch of the sun, over the length of
the days.

But to You, Yahweh, I come with naked sounds in
the morning. By later I may have adorned my words better,
but waking is black and white first copy, my heart’s first
grunt and sometimes song. It is so unrehearsed, but You-
the-
Word
know the first sound from my mouth; tone and emotion,
shorter and longer, that I do not wonder if you mistook
my colors
for someone else’s better requests.