The God of Words

Jarred Thompson

 

The God of Words is searching for a new dictionary;.

watching us in our journeys through foreign land.

Every millennia resetting the lexicon to try

this civilizing project

again,

again,

again

straining to write words

beneath our eyelids. We turned them up and out,

dying for the sun to dry who we were into us.

 

Words are just bone and fat searching

for a vein that can connect

everything – like when a brave explorer figures out the

clue to a buried treasure.

 

In these foreign lands we clawed through mountains

of sand and salt – cutting our palms. We climbed in-to-out-of salvation,

reaching the shoreline of our nations we gathered

plastic, condoms, drugs, babies, money, nuclear weapons:

hording meaning the way lovers wriggle out of each other’s tickling.

 

If the God of Words has given us this light-language

then we are filament overcome

by power surges, reduced

to illegal connections, given over

to higher rates and taxes.

Resolved to the ambiance of candles.

 

When the floods came we boarded up our doors and windows with dictionaries;

we built skyscrapers, declaring FINAL MEANING.

We didn’t feel small.

But how gargantually small: unable to feel the curvature of the Earth,

our languages like bows without arrows.

 

What can the arrow be but a new dictionary

of doubt. Saying: The God of Words is dead,

without dread.

Becoming what we’ve always been – mute spirits of feeling –

in the sounds we only hear when pressed up

pore to pure to pore.