Give Her A Chance (rev)

There is a risk that when you open up
your heart, a risk that when you start along
the path of saying how you care – risky
fundamental chance that twists of viscous
fate will rule the day. While you tremble as
you say the simple words which might expose
your harried soul doubt may pave the way
in words to teeter in a seething mind,
perhaps excite concupiscence in kind.
There’s risk in being blind where arrows fall,
there’s risk to fire them in the air at all
before you’re sure your aim is true, and where
the heart at which you loose them wears a guise
enamoured by the prize of love’s bequest,
you are distressed. Beware, sharpened arrows
fall with little care to render pain, and
pain unnamed is still decisive pain
to cancel out the gain of frail surmise.
There is risk to take no risk at all. Risk in an
appalling bleakness of no burning aspiration
only fear of failure, ridicule, rejection, even
condemnation. If that’s your contemplation you
deserve to fail; now look, she’s sitting sweetly there,
a winsome smile, a casual glance, she stifles stares –
she has the guile, ask her up to dance. To think of
failure means you’ll surely fail, give her a chance
to show you how she cares.
© 2005, I.D. Carswell