Submit your work, meet writers and drop the ads. Become a member
Malcolm May 23
I wake to spite, not morning's grace
A cracked old mug, a creased-up face.
These hands once built, now just complain,
These legs just ache, then ache again.
The world outside? A painted fraud.
At time I think Oh My Lord.
Sunrise? Just a cosmic ****.
In the mirror I see the same old Sod.
Bed’s a trap, and so’s the day.
It’s hell whichever game you play.

I sneer at hope, I scoff at light,
I'd punch a prayer clean out of sight!
The honest type? They make me gag,
Too soft to stand, too proud to sag.
No poem saves, no brush redeems,
No truth survives the in-betweens.
My thoughts? Let’s say they’d earn a cell
But I’m too bored these days to raise that hell.

I'm not insane, I’m just aware
That dreams don't buy you decent air.
I’m not depressed, just fully clear
There’s nothing left to want down here.
I bark, I *****, I bite my lip,
Then sip regret like whiskey drip.
I think of death with half a grin
Then **** myself for love again.

So here I sit, a charming wreck,
With wisdom hanging off my neck.
The world can burn, or go bake a pie
I'll judge it all and never try.
They say "Go Find yourself some peace!"
I guess I would rather find release.
well, now I’ve looked up there not once
but twice...
It hides beneath my unpaid vice.
But cheers to life, this grand hooray!
Where fools get rich, and cynics pay.
Copyright Malcolm Gladwin
May 2025
Jokes on Me ! - Happy Friday
Malcolm May 23
Our love was deeper than the ocean
deeper than Poseidon's sighs, where leviathans hum lullabies to sleeping coral,
our love churned beneath sapphire trenches — ancient, glowing,
etched in whale-song scripts that only the stars could read.
It spiraled downward past jellyfish lanterns, trailing silk,
where seaweed reached like dreaming fingers toward the memory of moonlight.

We walked along the shore
fairy-light footsteps, hands in clutch,
we danced across the silver moonlit shore,
where the sea birds screamed stories to the waves
and the waves replied with thunderous applause.
Tiny ***** in brown tuxedos spun pirouettes,
carrying secrets in shells, clicking out riddles for the sand to decode.

Falling through the clouds like a skydiver without a parachute
we plummeted like wingless angels giggling in gusts,
through cotton-candy cumulonimbus, pierced by rainbow veins.
A trumpet played jazz for the falling golden, reckless,
and somewhere below, Earth slipped on her own rhythm,
dodging our love like a bashful muse.

We walked through the fields
across hills and plains soaked in buttercup breath,
fields covered in flowers drunk on the sun’s honey.
The grass whispered ballads in chlorophyll tongues,
while rivers drew lazy spirals, their laughter tickling the rocks.
Above, the sky blushed cerulean, scattered with ink-drop swallows
and a single cloud shaped like a promise we never kept.

Stars sang lullabies for the tides, their voices stitched with cosmic thread,
and moons — glowing like prophets —drifted in dream-silk robes.
The sands of starlit beaches shimmered with golden orbs,
rolling like marbles tossed by gods with time to spare.
And we, mad and luminous, kissed in the tide’s breath
as if the universe had no need for sanity, only sound and spark.
Copyright Malcolm Gladwin
May 2025
Where Skydivers Dream and Whales Remember
Malcolm May 23
What bleeds
without wound?
What rises
before it knows it fell?

I am
the echo of something never said,
the smoke from fires still dreaming
of stars.

Once, I mistook love
for a door.
Now I know
it was the house,
and I had only just
learned how to knock.

"We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars."
So I kept my eyes full of sky
while the world pulled at my ankles.

They told me
to move on
I asked,
“But what if the road bends backward
to meet the heart again?”

I have worn regret
like a crown of thorns,
but let me tell you
even thorns soften
when touched by time.

What if the one you wait for
is still being carved
from storms you haven’t met?

What if you are
the answer
to someone else’s broken prayer?

I’ve walked through years
like forests with no compass,
but still
the trees whispered,
"There is more."

There is always more.
Even when the book closes,
another begins
in the margin.

"The wound is where the light enters you."
Then call me lantern
cracked, but burning.
Flickering with the faith
that love returns
in stranger forms,
at stranger times.

Who dares to love again
after the flood?

You do.

You
the riddle.
You
the answer waiting
in the next smile,
the next silence,
the next hand that doesn’t let go
when the lights go out.

This is not the end.
It never was.

Live like the universe
made you on purpose.
Love like forgetting
was never the goal.

Somewhere,
someone waits
not to complete you,
but to witness
your becoming.

And when they arrive
you’ll know.

You’ll know by the way
your name feels
safe
in their mouth
Spoken softly
on a
breeze.
Copyright Malcolm Gladwin
May 2025
Smoke dreaming of Stars from the fire
Malcolm May 23
You said forever,
and I
I believed like a child watching stars crash into oceans,
with fists full of broken promises
and pockets sewn shut by trust.

You took
something I can never get back.
My time.
My love.
My ******* everything.
You drank it like sweet wine,
spat it like sour truth.

I stood
through every fight
like the last soldier guarding a war no one cared to win.
I showed you joy
like colors to the blind,
a sky without roof,
a breath without fear.

You learned yourself
through me.
But did you ever learn me?

We painted sunsets.
Played in sand
like gods pretending not to bleed.
My best friend now has fur and four paws
she never lied,
never left.

And you...
you said you’d follow me to the ends of the earth.
Turns out you meant
until it got hard.
Until love
looked more like sacrifice
and less like escape.

I wasn’t jealous.
I was open.
Transparent.
A mirror with no back
and still
you ran.

And now,
six years crawl like ash in my lungs
and still,
I choke on your name
sometimes.
Sometimes, I smile.
Sometimes,
I rage like a storm that forgot how to rain.

You took what was sacred
and turned it
into strategy.
Calculated exits.
Silence like knives.

And I
I gave you music,
poetry,
freedom,
truth.
I gave you me.

Family
You said they hurt you,
used you,
bruised you.
And I believed.
But in the end,
you chose them
chose comfort in chaos
over the revolution of love.

You’ll say I was the villain.
Fine.
Every fairytale needs one.
But let the record bleed:
I built you
while I was breaking.

I gave you the map
and you used it
to leave me
stranded.

So no
I don’t forgive.
Not yet.
Maybe never.

Because how do you forgive
someone who burned down
the only home you ever built
with your bare hands?

And how do you forget
a fire that still
burns in your bones?

When I look into the eyes
The eyes of the past
and feel hollow.

You were rich with me.
We were rich in love,
in commitment,
in laughter,
in all the things
money can’t fake.

And still,
you threw it away
like loose change
in a foreign land.

I don’t care if you hide.
Memories
don’t need light
to haunt.

I still smell your ghost.
Still hear your voice
in songs we wrote.
Still see your smile
in the ruins of what could have been.

But never again.
Never again will I
give someone the key
to a kingdom they plan to plunder.

You were my best risk
and my greatest ruin,
even if all I was left with
was loss.

Maybe I’ll forgive,
one day,
when the stars stop remembering
how your name
felt like both prayer
and punishment.

But I will never forget.

Never.
Copyright Malcolm Gladwin
May 2025
Forgive an Forget
Malcolm May 22
you said maybe like it meant yes
in a language only I bled fluently.

you blinked
and i fell into
a duck pond of maybe tomorrows
while you dried off
in someone else’s sun.

i guess it waddled.
i guess it quacked.
and you laughed like that proved
you never promised me a thing.

but the feathers
still choke.
Copyright Malcolm Gladwin
May 2025
If it walks like a duck 🦆
Malcolm May 21
I slit the throat of mercy,
let it twitch in a puddle of neon grime
its prayers gurgled like poisoned lullabies.
I wear madness like a crown of soldered nerves,
sparking truth through every scream.

Heaven turned its back
so I bit hell's lip,
let it whisper me alive in tongues of gasoline.
I kissed the noose,
laced it with orchids and black powder.
Love?
I scalped it.
Hung its face on my wall like a holy relic.

The moon watches,
blind and complicit,
as I set fire to forgiveness
and dance in the smoke of dead apologies.

Art is a weapon.
I dip my brush in trauma,
splatter redemption on the white walls of silence.
Every stroke screams.
Every hue begs.

I carve verses into my thighs
to feel them bleed truth.
I don’t want peace
peace is anesthetic.
I want eruption,
******* of ache that crack the skin of now.

Safety's a padded coffin.
Hope’s a sedative laced with lies.
Give me ruin
give me flame
give me teeth on steel and pulse on chaos.

I am the sermon and the sin.
The preacher of collapse.
My god bleeds black ink,
and I drink it from the grail of my own skull.
Copyright Malcolm Gladwin
May 2025
Baptized in the static
Malcolm May 21
I slit the throat of consciousness,
let it bleed out in a ditch of ash and static.
Its pulse gurgles—red syrup on a canvas of bone,
splattered like a Jackson ******* fever dream.
Heaven’s deaf, a mute god with marble eyes,
so I scream to hell, and hell screams back,
a choir of razors, a hymn of shattered glass.
Care?
I murdered it.
Strangled it with barbed wire,
watched it choke on its own syrupy pleas.
Concern’s corpse swings from a chandelier of thorns,
its shadow giggling gasoline,
dripping fire that licks the floor clean.
I’m free now—unshackled,
a wolf chewing through its own leg to taste the wild.
Abstract paintings scream the truth
colors clawing at the edges of sanity,
blues that bruise, reds that **** the light.
Genius is a fever, a sickness that grins,
a parasite gnawing at the skull’s soft meat.
Who wants safety?
Safety’s a cage, a coffin of beige,
a life stitched shut with sterile thread.
I love this cremated life,
where care’s ashes swirl in a wind of now.
The minute is a blade, sharp and silver,
carving my name into the void’s black throat.
Heaven’s a lie, a pastel scam,
but hell’s honest—its flames don’t pretend to warm.
I dance in the embers,
my feet blistering hymns,
my heart a grenade with a pin half-pulled.
Consciousness twitches, not quite dead,
its eyes like cracked mirrors, reflecting rot.
I stab it again, for fun,
with a shard of starlight dipped in tar.
The world spins, an Alice-in-Wonderland slaughterhouse,
where clocks melt into pools of blood,
where roses scream and rabbits gnaw their own paws.
I’m the hatter, the queen, the guillotine grin,
serving tea spiked with arsenic dreams.
Feeling? I burned it alive.
Its screams were music,
a symphony of snapping bones and velvet wails.
Now I’m the moment, the pulse, the now
a god of my own wreckage,
crowned in thorns and neon scars,
laughing as the canvas bleeds.
Hell listens.
Hell understands.
And the abstract truth paints me whole.
Copyright Malcolm Gladwin
May 2025
****** Consciousness
Next page