Out Of Ideas… (Rev)

If I don’t write something good tonight
I will sleep without the comforting star
of deep believers, if I sleep at all, and
this light which ignites my enormous
poetic conceit and guides my muse will
suffer and die, my hands be stilled.

Tomorrow I might read these words
and endure the bite of astral derision,
contrite in failing to attain an irrelevant
end of my own, arrogant making, descrying
blight that screens my dream invention.

I have sagely delighted in little words
casually placed in weak conjunction
growing suddenly out of the page, thriving
in the space of a line, yielding the sweetest,
unintended rhyme and reaching for life;
it is what I die for.

But tonight the rhymes are bleak, the
rhythms lie broken and lifeless, steeped
in self-pity, and usually bright Canopus is
shaded; poor choices surround me with
listless conjecture, jaded, banal and
sourly dejected. I, too, am drained,
ill-used and rejected.
© I. D. Carswell 2006