Opportunity and Fear

On the doorstep of opportunity I knock with uncertainty and doubt.  I have never been so certain in my life yet the fear, the fear of failure, continues to creep into my mind.  What if I'm not good enough?  What if I'm wrong?  The burden of fear has cast an overwhelming shadow upon me and my mind has once again been chained to the walls of insecurity. I want to reach the promised land and enjoy the purity of life.  Oh how I long to be loved as I love.  My life has finally inched in the right direction, but my troubled past continues to slow my progress.  My life is crumbling around me before my very eyes. Rome may not have been built in a day but it was destroyed in one.  My scruffy beard masks the scares of my childhood so nobody can see them.  Hope is so fickle that it isn't even worth trying to gain it anymore.  The only certainty in my life is uncertainty.  Anything that seems set in stone is really just etched in pencil.  Each day I struggle to cope with the ever-changing currents.  My livelihood hangs in the balance on the tip of a fine needle.  The stock market graphs don’t hold a candle to the violent undulating roller coaster I call life.  Who would have thought that I would end up like this?  Only the sweet voice of tenderness beckons me back to the light.  Her flowing locks brush against my tormented face and her eyes pierce my crushed spirit.  I am so vulnerable and yet I don’t seem to care.  Her smile lifts me up so that I may be closer to the sun rather than grovel along the ground for mere rays of light.  My poetic tongue is cut off by her mere presence leaving me with nothing to do by smile back at her.  Such a fair maiden as tenderness would make the likes of Aphrodite jealous.  While I may be a pauper the one thing I do have to offer is my heart.  I hope she accepts it or else I don’t know what to do.  I may just run away to some distant shore and live my days as isolated craftsman perfecting my art.  What shall life bring me next?  What more can be thrown at me?  Is it finally my time to be on the favorable side of this madness?