Please note: These pieces are all copyrighted and are the possession of Cynthia Lott Vogel... They are not to be copied or used without permission from the writer. Please contact me at cynthialottvogel@gmail.com for this permission.
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My Prayer
By: Cynthia Lott Vogel
11-11-10
You are music…
….I am silence.
The spheres resound with the melody of You…
Put me in harmony
--May I live attune.
Disease spawned dullness
That humbles my tongue and
Mumbles my thought,
Flattens my consideration of You to
Three mere dimensions.
Expand my grasp.
Quicken Yearning…
Awake my hunger…
Put the taste of You
On my lips and tongue.
Quicken Desire
Spawn passion
Do a new thing in me,
O Creator-God.
A new heart do I require
One that beats in time with Yours;
One open wide to the
Immensity and awfulness of You.
Roar down from the heavens…
….Whisper to my heart.
Intrigue me into passionate pursuit.
I do not hunger on my own, O God.
I am too ready sated
With mundane experience
And easily diverted by exhaustion.
Invigorate my spirit to pant after You.
And open my eyes Wide
To the terrible delight of You, oh Yahweh!
Profane Pain
by Cynthia Lott Vogel
3-25-11
Something is there....
It rudely elbow-shoves its way into my peaceful sleep,
Tossing aside my dreams like fist-fighting TV ninjas accost an opponent.
It screams its way through the darkness splitting the silence with an alarm shrill as an
Ambulance shrieks terror into the night.
A raucous pain as unwelcome as a 4 a.m. wake-up call.
Pain starts at my exploding head and screams its way down my spine,
Numbing my lumbar-stump legs and splitting those wooden appendages as cleanly as
An ax might fell a mighty oak.
Faith music sings into the night mocking my pain
(Or is it the other way around?)
The sweet tunes and their lilting joy oppose and are made foolish by
The unholy sacrilege of agony.
The joyful tones become the heresy
As the profanity of pain assumes the throne...
Spewing its vulgar vernacular
which then becomes my mother tongue.
A becoming as unbecoming as they come.
No.
This is the cross:
A bloody debauchery of Promise.
A spectacle of suffering that abases every hope
of Life reigning glorious and is rather,
A revolting depravity of expectation.
It calls to question
every assumption of life and self.
And challenges every fiber of Belief in my being;
Squashes every aspiration of my future.
But those concerns are the background drumbeat to the
Melody line of agony.
The immediate thing
to be tackled (by) is the present tensing of every fiber
and the shrill cackle of a tone-deaf singer
-to whom Music is a foreign tongue-
Who shrieks her way into my morning and
Launches the paroxysm of dance's mockery:
The convulsing contortions;
My body's gyrations to her tune
in its efforts to Find. Some. Relief. NOW.
Hand shaking top popping pill dropping
water guzzling desperate measures
come from desperate people
In desperate times of desperate need.
The Keeper
12-2010
Cynthia Lott Vogel
Yours are the only ears who will hear
The only tongue to recount
Of that which my brain
Struggles to make sense…
And miserably fails.
I reach for the phone. Once,
Twice
Twenty times.
But what is there to say?
“Help me, my brain is broken.
My body is broken
My brain is pained?”
I would not be able to give voice
To my sentience
That with full volume sound
Crashing in my ears…
Nothing penetrates the
Intrusion of thought.
Not thoughts which I command;
Thoughts that command me.
Pictures which are not.
Voices which speak not
But are too loud to bear.
Plots that grab and carry me to places
Both absurd and terrifying.
Both absurd and terrifying.
Meaning has fled.
And everything propounds
Too much significance
To possibly decipher.
God why?
Why should my body be broken
My brain hurt?
Is not one enough?
I cannot hear the music.
The music has fled
At the din of my thought.
There is no distraction great enough--
Save maybe one--
But o God, I know where
That road ends.
Thoughts, desperate grasping
Thoughts
Of escape.
Enough to swallow
Enough to sleep?
Enough to cease?
No more inspiration
Only expiration.
Sorry, this deadline has expired.
There will be a fine.
The deadline
Is a fine line.
One difficult to find
When you are looking for it.
Is there no one to call?
No hand to save.
No voice that I could hear
Above this furor?
Doctors fight to save our bodies
Pastors preach to save our souls.
Who is there to save a mind?
Banging. Knocking.
Thrice I’ve gone, expectant
To answer.
And there is the silence of
An empty porch.
Abandoned drive.
Who is it that knocks?
The Reaper?
Or the Keeper?
Why, why should he keep me?
In a grip tight as restraint?
Coming Unhinged
04-25-2010
Fear: intense; believable. And totally my own –
I scare you? Then hang tight that stone…
Your fragile home can come crashing down,
No one is immune!
Thoughts that all ears can hear….
Of threats, violence, pitiless jeers
Voices; with whom to converse –
Then the question “Why were you talking to yourself?”
Finding, once the pieces again are one,
That some inexplicable things were done.
( They were not odd— just insane)
Although unrecalled; I’m the one they blame.
The fear on the faces I must
Mistrust
Suspicion
Exhaustion
Stealing the control when I had none.
A Gray December Day
By
Cynthia Lott Vogel
12-15-09
Arden Hill
All Rights Reserved
It is a gray December day…
From my hospital view, to one side,
I see trees stretching skeletal fingers at the sky
And swallows swimming the surface of rooftops.
Smoke curls from piped outlets and lazily joins
The sky’s watercolored mounds in leaden obscurity.
Hints of light at the horizon peer;
Offering hope of a more illumined morn.
My scene to the other extreme,
Offers an open door with glimpses of harassed,
Always-moving healers bearing burdens of cure
To those in their care.
Worried visitors shrink into their coat collars and plunge
Dogged, into doors where death waits.
A Question of Confusion
Cynthia Lott Vogel
01-01-2009
All Rights Reserved
I am confined within my nights’ dreams...
Cannot escape the swirling morass
Of mind’s invention and eerie unreality;
Bizarre characters parade through my thoughts
And my eyes corner them—
Brief flickers as they pass in the daylight.
My nights are interwoven through my days…
And I am unsure of my skill at discerning
Between fact and that which
Is the nightspawn of a fractured mind.
I think, sometimes, I would
Choose to live in the whirling implausible
Rather than chew the reality on my plate
That is even harsher to swallow.
Mind Isolation
By
Cynthia Lott Vogel
01-01-09
All rights reserved
There are miles between us…
For you and everyone in my world.
I see lips move
But can’t fathom their drift….
Cannot feel their heart beating.
This warm rush of blood is not
Your kind humanity,
Nor is it my delight to greet you.
I stretch out my arms,
In lonely longing for an embrace
But find myself clutching at naught.
Friends, as have you, chose distance;
Shutting their hearts tight against
Insanity’s demands.
Those who venture approach
Leave me lonelier than not.
Words ricochet like bullets—
Off of my armored heart.
Yet, Love’s arrows pierce and draw blood.
I hear your voices from a great
Unspanable distance.
I pound my hands at
The crystalline walls between us
‘Til ruby puddles run at my feet…
Recognizing futility
I retreat and draw my heart
To its solitary home;
Locking it tight against hope;
Fast against companionship’s Communiqué.
The Faithful and True
By Cynthia Lott Vogel
02/12/08
All Rights Reserved
Lord of Hosts, come with Galactic Legions leading;
Flaming Warriors with scythe-sharp sabers stayed
Pending Your ready cry of Justice.
Nothing impeding
Your mission of Rightness, Restoration,
All things renewed.
Wrongs righted; Right knighted; Knaves checkmated.
Creation singing
Exultant canticles of triumph…
Paeans that herald the arrival of Justice
After long nights’ abated breath;
Hope tenaciously sustained.
Earth and man wait to be reclaimed
Renovated, restored, reconciled…
Redeemed
From the tyranny of Death’s merciless grip.
We long for the sight of that mighty thigh
Emblazoned with the Essence of Your Name:
Faithful and True
Amen.
The amen to the promise of God
Marches in triumph treading the winepress
Of wrath for those who slaughter and slight
Degrade, demean, and deny
The faithful and the Truth.
Come, Y’shua, Savior of men, wielding the
Sword of incisive utterance
That cuts and quickens the dead who listen
For Your bidding to resume their Dance.
Dog Days
10/25/82
Cynthia Lott Vogel
All Rights Reserved
You sleep-mutter and toss;
We turn and fit our bodies
Together in sleep—or its search.
Alternately, through the night,
We awaken one another
With our panicked jumps at dreams’ end,
And sigh
Moving again to find slumber’s position.
I peer at the dim lit clock.
Myopic eyes fail to see
But only know that the digit-flips
Are slow to end this restless night.
At last we both awaken and know
That we need struggle no longer.
You kiss my nose and
Somehow find rapture to bound out of bed,
Body twisting and arching as you leap
In the ecstasy of the day.
Glad only for the night’s end
You do a day-dance,
Sleek fur shining in its blackness,
You bound back onto the bed
And, paws on my chest and
Another wet kiss for my nose,
Tell me to join you in your
Glad greeting of the morning.
I, bag-eyed and head heavy—
Throbbing—
Roll to see the morning’s light,
Grey and metallic
That hits my windows.
Its face echoes mine
But you neither notice nor complain
As you, in puppy joy,
Gather your toys, one by one
To show me
And run to greet the house’s inhabitants.
Out side the leaves twist and spin,
Somehow reminding me of your dance,
As they fall.
But they fall without your delight;
Only with a hopeless, inevitable
Quest for the ground
Where they may molder
In final sleep—
