Lamar Howell's Weblog

This message is being exhaled and

transmitted on every frequency known,

in low gutteral sighs and high undulating mega-hurts

I’m whispering it, I’m screaming

seeming to dream yet wide awake

I’m spilling it all out here

Like coins from a shattered piggy bank

I’ll separate the money from the pink glass

and classify it all when I have a chance to think

I don’t want an answer to this blather

Rather, to know that God is close by.

I sit by the firebowl

where I hold a slab of maple flooring, and

when the flames flicker high enough

to light the grain so I can see, I write.

Will this prayer end up being doomed,

consumed with the wood that it’s written on?

Maybe that’s the fate of every sincere prayer

It begins down here in the lower atmosphere

And ascends, beyond the ionosphere

through the bi-millenial rift he made

with his own wood in cruciform.

The words breaks through

to where God sits, suddenly warmed, on the edge of His chair.

Sifting slowly through the smoke and ash

he dusts off the costly treasure and blows away the lowly trash.