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Malcolm 6d
How often do you look inside,
and find the parts you try to hide?
The dreams you lost, the fear you keep,
the thoughts that stir when you're half-asleep?

How often do you walk away,
from chances you meant to take that day?
Do you watch the world go passing by,
and feel too small to even try?

How often do you fall, then crawl,
wishing you could stand up tall?
But something holds you in the dirt
a voice that whispers, “you’ll get hurt.”

How often do you speak your mind,
and leave the careful words behind?
Or search for truth in what you feel,
even if it cuts, even if it's real?

How often do you cry alone,
in quiet rooms that feel like stone?
And still, somehow, you wipe your eyes
and face the day before sunrise.

How often do you trust what's new,
the road ahead with no clear view?
Or sit and stare at empty air,
at things you wish were really there?

How often do you try to see
the parts of you you hide so deep?
To open up, to take the chance
on love, on hope, on sweet romance?

How often do you ride the wave,
let go, be bold, be less afraid?
Or do you laugh, or break the rules,
play your part and bend the tools?

But through the dark and through the light,
through every wrong, through every right
when all is lost or all is won,
when storms are gone and skies are sun

Just be yourself—no need to prove,
no need to run, no need to move.
You’re enough in every place
in every fall, in every grace.
Copyright Malcolm Gladwin
APRIL 2025
How often
Malcolm 7d
Let people be.
Let them breathe,
let them live free
whether they are he, she, or joyfully three.

Who cares what they look like,
where they come from,
or how they speak?
They are people.
They rise, they fall,
they laugh, they seek.

They deserve to walk their own way,
to love, to cry,
to dance in the sun or weep in the rain,
without shame
and without a chain.

So what if they don’t fit the shape
your mind molds as “normal”?
That’s your cage.
This is their stage.

No need to love as they do
just let them be true.
Let them shine in their own sky,
wear their names with pride,
even if their pronouns
don’t match the tide.

They bleed red,
they dream in color.
They’ve felt grief,
they’ve cherished another.
So why should their joy
be cause for alarm?
Why does their truth
feel like harm?

Each life is one
let it count,
without need for approval
or fearful doubt.

It’s okay if someone born a he
feels within a radiant she.
It’s okay to find love
wherever love chooses to be.
It’s okay to be soft,
to be bold,
to be different,
to break the mold.

There is no need for convention,
no rule to conform
let them be fire,
let them be form.

Happiness harms no one.
Difference is not a crime.
So why does it bother so many
when others simply wish to shine?

All lives matter.
This earth belongs to all.
Every voice, every shade,
every rise, every fall.

Don’t let hate
sit in your heart.
Don’t let judgment
tear others apart.

Love.
Love wide.
Love those who stand
on the other side.

Help each other.
Lift each other.
We are all brothers, sisters,
fathers, mothers
children of this spinning place.
And if one truly looks face to face,
they’ll find kindness
where they once saw fear.

There are greater battles
than long hair or buzzed styles,
than lovers who smile
in ways that don’t match your files.

Accept what is different.
See the beauty in change.
It takes every kind
to turn the world’s range.

Let people be.
They don’t need permission to exist.
They deserve to be seen,
respected,
and missed.
Copyright Malcolm Gladwin
April 2025
Let people be !
Malcolm 7d
Sunday—just another day,
Prayer—just another way.
Silence—just another reply,
Thinking—just another reason why.

Still, we keep doing
still, we keep asking
as if "another"
might finally mean something.
Copyright Malcolm Gladwin
April 2025
Just Another
Malcolm Apr 5
Life is a ******* canvas,
a mess you don’t know you’ve stepped into,
until your foot’s stained
a smear of doubt,
blood from the gods you thought you knew,
the first breath
a slap,
a jagged line that cuts into the gut of you.
****, it hurts,
but you keep painting
‘cause the world ain’t built without your hands in the ****.

It’s paint on your face,
the drip of your own blood
mixed with rage,
‘cause what’s life if not a battle between what you want to touch and what’s been forced into you?
You’re born with a brush in your palm,
but the strokes are jagged,
sharp edges,
a million questions you don’t have answers for.
You want to fix it
but the canvas bleeds through your fingers,
so you just keep ******* going.

Each line is war,
each color is death,
each mistake is your soul
ripping open like a wound.
Nothing is clean here,
not the art, not the mind,
not the **** heart beating like a beast in your chest.
You hit the page with fury,
twisting the paint till it burns,
till it scars.

You step back,
but only to get a clearer picture of the wreck you’ve made.
Life, like a painting,
is the blood of your struggle,
the grit of the grind,
the brutality of change.
Can’t fix it,
can’t make it perfect
It is what it is
but ****, you can make it yours.
You can make it raw,
tear it apart with your bare hands,
and watch it bleed into something real.
‘Cause at the end, it ain’t about the clean edges,
it’s about the chaos
the mark of the beast you leave on it,
the rage and hunger that refuses to die.

And when it’s done
you’ll see it.
All of it.
Every jagged, broken line,
every scar on the page,
and you’ll know,
the mess was never the mistake.
It was always the point,
to paint...
Copyright Malcolm Gladwin
APRIL 2025
Paint ...
Malcolm Apr 4
I stepped inside
where the wind
had no voice.

The air
tasted of ash.
No hymns
on the walls.
No scent
of old incense
only grime,
and the slow drip
of what once was belief.

There was a chair
facing the corner,
like someone
left it
in shame.
No one sat there.
But something did.

My hands
they shook
but not from fear.
From memory.
From the body
remembering
how to beg.

No altar.
No flame.
Just frost
in the throat
of the room.

I pressed
my ear
to the floor
heard nothing
but the hum
of absence,
ravenous
and kind.

No voice came.
No thunder.
No revelation.
Only the soft sound
of God
never being here
at all.

Then I wonder why ?
Copyright Malcolm Gladwin
April 2025
God's not home
Malcolm Apr 4
I hope you’re awake.
The world is breaking.
We don’t want comfort
we want peace.

They say you made us.
Then why does hunger
wear your name?
Why do your children
sleep in the cold?

We ask for quiet.
You answer with silence.
We sing to the sky,
but no echo returns.

Did you craft this grief?
The pain we hold?
Or did we give you shape
to carry the blame?

We argue, we fight,
we fall for belief
but no hand lifts us
when we fall.

Your name lives in laws,
in fire,
in war.
If you wrote the book,
why let it burn?

No crown.
No wings.
No final word.
Just hearts breaking
in the dark.

Still, the bombs fall.
The children weep.
The oceans rise.
And hope thins.

Are you still watching,
or did you turn away
before the smoke rose?

I used to pray.
Now I reflect.
If you are real,
then why the silence?

PS:
We need a miracle.
Copyright Malcolm Gladwin
April 2025
Letter to heaven
Malcolm Apr 4
How dare you
click in the dark
with soft, uncalloused fingers
scraping what you didn’t bleed for,
scratching through ash
for sparks you didn’t birth.

I see you.
Vulture-eyed, dead-hearted,
sifting through soul for a dopamine hit.
You didn’t live it.
You didn’t scream it into a pillow at 3 a.m.
You didn’t shake with the ink.

You didn’t die for it.
I did.

But still
you rip out ribs of rhythm,
plagiarize pulse,
regurgitate ghosts
with your baby-AI mimicry,
your Frankensteined stanzas
stitched from the flesh of my grief,
I noticed,
I see you.

Little girl,
child of the click-and-paste spell,
you wear stolen metaphors
like cheap perfume
loud, tacky, choking,
wondering how it must be to feel?

I see the sudden genius
that bloomed from nowhere.
A drought of silence—then flood.
Words once dry
now drip with my salt, my blood, my pain
and you dare to name it yours?

I know my structure.
I fathered that form.
I spit syllables like bones,
stacked them in temples of torment,
broke English to make it feel,
broke myself to make it real,
and you think I don't know?

And now?
You **** the marrow of my music,
flesh-ripper,
content-corpse-dancer,
vampire with no hunger but vanity.
You steal scars and call it style,
Not all vampires **** blood.

Wonder, as you do
Muse won’t visit you.
She’s not fooled by filters
or your cosplay of pain.
She knows the difference
between trauma
and trend.

I see the telltales,
Regurgitated vocabulary,
gpt traced structure.
the sudden depth in shallow ponds,
the cracked mask of borrowed fire.
Your voice stinks of syntax theft.
I smell my soul on your verses,
One look I and I knew immediately.

You can’t fake origin.
You cant fake originality.
You can’t counterfeit truth.
And when you post your pretty poem,
know this:
You’re wearing my bones.
And they don’t fit.

I made this style.
I made this monster.
And it does not love its thief.

So burn in the echo.
You earned that silence.
You earned that shame.
May it echo louder
than any stolen applause
you’ll ever gain,
for every like you get,
know it's not yours.
Copyright Malcolm Gladwin
April 2025
To the poetry thief I see you
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