Lamar Howell's Weblog

Prophets, to be heard, must masquerade as poets. Their soliloquy, once admired, seeps into the soul, like raindrops through a nylon tent. But the art lover must reach out to touch the lining and break up the droplets. Then truth’s moist kiss moves from fingertips to shirt, then to the breast.

The fiat sword is masked as a letter-opener; the fiery words as a warm dancing glow; any divine ultimatum laid out like a lover’s desperate lunge across the threshold of a fleeing paramour. The prophet’s goat-hair garments hidden beneath a spider-web-thin sheer of rhyme and rhythm; its earthy smell muffled by lows and highs, no–aloes and hyacinth–of intonation, and the whirr and myrrh of accented, scented speech. His hewn, crooked staff doubles as a poker, ribbing now and then with eye-rolling puns amid small doses of cherry-flavored satire. He taps on the stony path, as if to clear the way for the truth-blind, yet poetically inclined 20-20 mind.