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

Absurdly, Words Are Messengers

An attribute of age – this making words

on screen emerge larger than their act
in life – but I’m not fooled by it! I know
a thing or three of words uttered under
pressure or words chosen in fear. I have
lived with words a long and eager time
of it – here I will say it is not the words
which ream the heart or blight the ear.

It is why you say the words which strikes
the blow or sweetly soothes the ache in
hand; absurdly, words are messengers of
inner states behind a mind’s syntax, clear
and cogent acts expressed in words we
think while watching eyes belie the facts.
© 15 December 2007, I. D. Carswell