Colorless

I found a chart that did provide

A list of traits and qualities

Each assigned with care and pride

Colors for personalities.

Red they describe in words that feel

Impatient, intense and driven.

Forgetting that red can also heal

Love’s tender heart, forgiven.

Orange was simpler, fun, outgoing

Risk takers, brash, careless

And here again nuance forgoing

Reduced to something less.

Yellow, green, blue and all

Treated on a similar scale

Kind, detailed, and respectful

Seems shallow, dim and pale.

As though any human, fair and flawed

Could be encompassed so

With simple summaries so awed

Our reason we would forgo.

One might consider that we all are

Each of the colors in turn

From day to year with every scar

More of ourselves we learn.

But I think of myself and wonder

Which colors or palette hold

And in those musings begin to wander

Towards answers uneasy, cold.

Colorless seems most accurate

Though easily misread

Something like water, which will imitate

The container and sky overhead.

My shape, my color, are not my own

Refracted, reflected and bent

I am, myself, a distortion

Of the time and place I’m sent.