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Malcolm May 21
Somewhere
beneath the eyelid's last blink
where glass bleeds light,
and truth flinches like a rat in church,
a Psalm shatters,
cracking the spine of silence.

I saw God’s silhouette in reverse
a negative burn,
its arms were questions,
its eyes were hollows,
and its scream—a flicker in dead film.

Tell me
what’s a universe if not
a deaf match struck in a snowstorm?

I licked the ash of a star once.
It tasted like birth
and every lover who ever left without closing the door.

Time taps its nails on bone
tick. tick. tick.
Each second a parasite,
sipping marrow,
etching the shape of forgetting
on my skull.

No map.
No north.
Only echoes whispering:
“you were never here.”

Even solace is a trick
a ghost draped in perfume and mother’s hands,
gone when you turn to name it.

I broke a clock to stop the wound.
(It laughed.)

Now
I collect shadows.
I press them between pages of not-quite-meaning,
each a brittle wing.

Is this God?
—a hum in the static,
—a fault line in grammar,
—a riddle whispered backwards
through the teeth of a dying flame?

Listen:
There is a drone inside the ordinary.
It gnaws.
Not loud
but certain.

You want reason?
You want rules?

Here’s the cipher:
There is none.
Only this:

A flicker. A fracture. A fall.
Then something unnamed
that feels like knowing.

But isn’t.
Copyright Malcolm Gladwin
MAY 2025
The Godprint Cipher”
(a fractured riddle poem)
Malcolm May 21
Don’t whisper in dried-out dirges
that all this flickering
is hollow.
That dreams are ash,
and flesh is just a waiting cell.

The soul, if such a beast still gnaws,
rots deeper when left numb
Not all walls are built to hold,
not all truths are what they hum.

Life isn’t real
it just feels like it might be
when the pain bites clean.
But the grave isn’t the goal.
It’s the breath before it,
the silence
we dance inside,
pretending it speaks.

Dust-to-dust, sure.
But the soul?
It breaks different
like glass remembering light,
or a scream you swallowed
and called prayer.

You weren’t born to smile or weep,
no.
You were shaped to move
to mark some subtle shift in the void,
to fall forward
even when crawling.

Art lasts.
But time
time is a thief in velvet boots,
slitting courage open,
while your heart
marches a funeral beat,
wearing someone else’s armor.

The world is war.
Not guns and medals
but breath,
betrayal,
mornings.
Don’t herd with the hollow-eyed
be the chaos they never saw coming.
Be your own myth.

Don’t flirt with futures dressed in silk—
don’t mourn the past’s carcass.
It’s gone.
Rotting in memory’s echo chamber.

Breathe the now
tear it open.
Live like the ceiling leaks God.
And you're standing beneath it,
cup in hand.

Heroes die.
But their noise lingers
a footprint, maybe,
that the lost will find.
Or a wound
someone else mistakes for a map.

So rise
or crawl
or scream in motion.
Whatever fits.
Just don’t stop.

Let fate break its teeth
on your persistence.
Let patience sharpen you
and
Perseverance your
motto.

Because this isn’t just a dream
it’s a riddle
with blood on its lips
or
A dream caught in a
dream.
Copyright Malcolm Gladwin
May 2025
Dreamspine (after Longfellow)
Malcolm May 20
Who crept like rot through heaven’s door,
and stole the glow the moon once wore?
Who plucked the stars from velvet sky
left them bleeding, left them dry?

The silver cradle, cracked and gone,
no lull of light to lean upon.
The hush was thick, the dark was near,
no whisper far, no breath to hear.

The thief wore night like skin too tight,
and swallowed whole the edge of light.
They tore the seams of stitched-up flame,
and left the void without a name.

No song rose in midnights might, no gull took air nor mid nor flight,
just darkened ash where stars once sang and they left a empty pang.
A hush so loud it screamed through bone
a silence that devoured every tone.

Each shimmer, ripped from sky like thread,
each hymn of dusk now choked by the dead.
The frost clung hard to every vein,
no thaw, no sun, just gnawing pain.

No lark to stir the wounded sun,
no sparrow’s cry, no morning run.
Just echoes in a frost-bit field,
where once the warmth of wonder kneeled.

Who dared defile that sacred dome?
Who stripped the stars and fled their home?
No name, no footstep, no retreat
just wreckage left beneath their feet.

The world, a husk of breathless stone,
no glow, no grace, just gristle, bone.
The moon—unhooked, her bed grown cold,
her stories lost, her silence bold.

What worth this world, this wasted tomb?
Where shadows bloom and roses gloom.
Where joy once dared to dance with art
they tore the night, they stole my heart.

I curse their hands, their silent ****,
their artless theft, their frozen will.
They’ve burned the night, they’ve bled the skies,
and left me here with hollow eyes.

No songs remain, no light, no flame,
no clouds with thought, no breath, no name.
Just endless dark and hope’s last cry,
where dreams lay down their wings to die.

The thief has fled with heaven’s heat,
and left my soul in scorched defeat,
But still I stand with yonders stare,
Nothing left but darkness bare.
Copyright Malcolm Gladwin
May 2025
Thief of the night - a poem depression

It's a old poem that I thought I would share ! Unless you know what it feels like to be depressed you won't understand the meaning in the words .
Malcolm May 20
Square breathes ash
gaslight’s twitch,
flickering truth
in a puddle of pitch.

He croaks.
"Come buy, come bite"
His tongue a hook,
his grin not right.

Crow gathers.
Eyes rusted shut.
Morals on mute.
Hope? Cut.

Meat swings
arms of the disappeared,
femurs of the faithful
nothing’s sacred here.

Prices sing:
A thigh for a thrill,
A pence for the tongue
that once whispered, still.

Butcher’s plate shines,
not silver—just red,
a pile of love
now splendidly dead.

"Step in! Step up! It’s holy, it’s hot!"
He laughs in cleavers,
bones in a knot.
His fingers glide ribs
like memory lost
No guilt. No name.
Just meat and cost.

These veins once ran
with lullabies.
Now they pulse
in motherless cries.

Who spun the blood
into life’s first thread?
Gone now.
Unwoven.
Unsaid.

Eyes
once torches,
now jars of fog.
Dreams rot faster
in this catalogue.

And still it hums
the stall, the street,
with coins that clink
and boots that beat.
Souls
unstitched
in stalls of shame,
each cut a prayer
without a name.

The heart
oh God, that fragile crime
now skewered,
oozing
beet-red rhyme.

It once held hymns.
It once held grace.
Now it sells for less
than a hollow face.

What’s beauty?
What’s form?
What’s breath to a knife?
What’s hunger but theft
disguised as life?

Reverence? Gone.
Devotion? Flayed.
The altar’s now
a butcher’s blade.

No psalms.
No sacred lull.
Only meat,
and the market’s pull.

He sings decay
a hymn of ache,
as crowds buy flesh
and morals break.

The stars won’t blink.
They’ve seen this play.
Where bones are stock,
and gods decay.

Hooks sway like ghosts
in post-mortem sleep
no tears for the sold,
no cries for the keep.

We sell,
we chew,
we grin,
we choke
on the sins we bought
but never spoke.
Copyright Malcolm Gladwin
May 2025
THE PEDLAR’S CHANT “We sold the soul, but kept the meat.”
Malcolm May 20
I’ve bitten the stars for less
But her?
She is the storm behind my ribs,
a church I burn down just to worship what remains.

She’s not a woman.
She’s the collapse.
The white-fire fracture that bursts through my sleep,
makes gods tremble, makes the air bleed sugar and ash.

She is more.
More than breath, than ***, than soul.
More than hunger dressed as desire,
more than the dream I never knew I was dying in.

No verse holds her. No psalm.
No drug, no moonlit ghost.
She is the ache in every silence,
the rhythm that murders the metronome.

I want her like famines want bread,
like oceans want thunder.
She’s not the answer
she’s the flood that drowns the question.

I’ve touched a thousand fires.
None seared like her whisper.
She’s the madness I married with open veins,
the calm that slit my chaos clean.

Don’t speak to me of beauty
I’ve seen it bow before her shadow.
Don’t tell me to dream
I wake in her body.

She is all that I want
and everything I never dared carve from heaven.
She is more.
She is more than anything ever dared to be real.

And nothing
not love, not death, not gods
compares.
Copyright Malcolm Gladwin
May 2025
Malcolm May 20
When the sky forgets to burn,
and the clouds hang like tired eyes
you crack the dark
with a mischievous smile
and a laugh that dances louder than the rain.

You
a rebel sunbeam,
ripping holes in the grey of my mind,
sowing jokes where sorrow tried to root.
You
the reason gravity feels like grace.

I’ve walked through days thick with ash,
hands stuffed in pockets of “almost” and “too late,”
but then
you.
You and your wildlight heart.
You, who wear joy like armor
and kindness like warpaint.

You make the silence sing,
and even the broken clocks spin hopeful.

I’ve seen the world bite down—hard,
but you bit back with beauty,
with stories,
with silliness
that made even the grimace grin.

When I think of you
I remember how light feels.
Not the fluorescent kind.
The soul kind.
The laughter-soaked,
midnight-spilled-stardust kind.

You are the rescue I didn’t know I needed.
A lighthouse with jokes.
A firefly that never dies.
You turn every graveyard thought
into a garden joke.

And I
I am better when I stand in your glow
Even if you roll over an fall asleep after the show.
Copyright Malcolm Gladwin
May 2025
Inside joke at the end that she will get
Malcolm May 20
What is the All-Seeing Eye
Do you think it's real?
They said it was for peace,
a wire under your skin,
your laugh in a data vault,
your scream — timestamped and indexed.
They called it security,
but it had the stink of war.

We fed the All-Seeing Eye
with our faces,
our flaws,
our petty searches
“how to love,”
“how to lie,”
“how to disappear without dying.”
It watched.
It blinked never.

We are metadata ghosts,
grief tagged in 4K,
crying in front of smart TVs
that whisper back at night.
Our cameras smile when we don’t.
Our phones know before we do.

The walls listen
not metaphorically.
The bricks have ears
and the sky is bugged.
Satellites trace our hearts
like fragile heat signatures.
Love becomes a red dot.
Desire = anomaly.

Snowden wasn’t a leak
he was a scream.
A fracture.
He tore the veil and found code.
PRISM, XKeyscore , TripWire
not names,
but wounds.

This is not fiction.
China grades its citizens.
The West sells fear in high-def.
Your guilt is presumed,
your innocence archived,
your freedom
licensed, leased, denied.

What are we when every silence
has a transcript?
What are we
when eyes without lashes
watch us sleep?
A body of flesh,
tagged by code,
chained to clouds that never rain.

Encrypt your breath.
Whisper in analog.
Paint your truth on cave walls.
Rebel with rotten passwords.
Burn your SIM in holy fire.
Give them nothing but static,
nothing but noise,
because
data doesn’t bleed.
Copyright Malcolm Gladwin
May 2025
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