Out of ideas…

If I don’t write something good tonight I will sleep
without the comforting Canopus 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 the 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