Tools for life

Has life ever dumped you in a heap?
Perhaps you’ve found self belief so strongly
reinforcing that doubt never enters it,
nor divorces you from your own reality.

While I admire conviction I see it an
affliction of the blessed, sign of the righteously
possessed and indeed, a decent place to serve
a sentence for dereliction of self doubt.

I argue without it I am a cautious man and
easy to live with, I resound like a drum,
resonate to sympathetic percussion,
inflating nothing, merely imitating sound.

I feed on my doubt, I feast into the long night
of feverish dreams, fitfully sleep from crisis
to crisis, I am fêted, riven, inspected,
and reformed in every second of oblivion.

I waken rehabilitated, consummate with
confidence I can face the day’s rigors and
pursue challenges in the same vigorous
way I did yesterday.

And I die in the dawn of each new consequence,
ashamed I have no plan but the rising sequences
of random words, at times inadequate, at others
inspiring, as my tools for life.
© I.D. Carswell