Tools For Life (rev)

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 sadly as
an affliction of the righteously blessed, sign
of the possessed, indeed a decent place to
serve 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 imitate sound. 

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

I sleep easily and awaken rehabilitated,
consummate with confidence I can face the
day’s rigours and pursue challenges with the
same vigour as I did yesterday. 

And I die in the dawn of each new consequence,
ashamed I have no plan but these sequences of
random words, at times inadequate, at times
inspiring, as my tools for life.
© 2006, I.D. Carswell