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Malcolm Apr 6
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
Malcolm Apr 4
I don’t cry anymore
the salt ran dry.
I don’t look up
the sky stopped looking back.
I don’t believe
in believing.

Where are you now,
God of broken pages?
That book
full of thunder,
full of fire,
full of once.

Where are the miracles
when we need them
more than ever?
Silence
—louder than prayer.

You’ve
forsaken me
in my heart,
forsaken me
in my mind,
forsaken me
in my...

Why?
Copyright Malcolm Gladwin
April 2025
Forsaken me
Malcolm Apr 4
I stopped it
right there
in my mind
between one tear
and the next blink.
The world cracked still.
Like God forgot the script.
Like clocks
finally choked on their lies.

And I walked
barefoot,
through the frozen ache of light
curling like fog around a laugh
you almost had.

I tasted
the rain before it hit the ground,
let it linger on my tongue
like the names I never said.
Kissed the steam
off your coffee cup
and whispered secrets
to the dust motes in your room
they listened better than people ever did,
I held your smell in my nose,
drowning in each scent.

A hummingbird mid-flap,
stuck between flight and forever
I kissed it too.
Soft as ambition
dying in a cold city.

I held a flower
for a thousand years.
It never withered.
My hand did.

I found love
locked in the way your lip curled
right before goodbye.
I held that moment
until my own heart cracked
like glass under memory.

You think stopping time heals?
No.
It just slows the pain
to a crawl
so you can savor it.

I walked through lovers
like churches.
Empty.
Sacred.
Haunted by prayers
no one answers anymore.
I touched your cheek,
and you didn’t flinch.
First time.
Last time.
Every time.

I bent over my younger self
still full of fire and delusion.
Didn’t wake him.
Didn’t warn him.
He needed the fall.
We always need the fall.

If I lived forever,
I’d write poems on comet tails
and stitch stars
into the silence.
But I’d still miss you.
Every hour.
Of every never-ending day.

Time isn’t the enemy
it’s the proof
we ever mattered.

But still
in that breathless hush
where nothing moved
I kissed the sky,
held the world in my palm,
and told it:

“Stay here.
Don’t move.
Just let me feel
everything
before it’s gone.”
in the moment
forever.
Copyright Malcolm Gladwin
April 2025
When Time Held Its Breath for Me
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