The page demands another line—
A rhythm struck in time,
A syllable, a measured beat,
A stanza cut in rhyme.
I feed it meter, feed it breath,
I feed it form and flame,
A metaphor, a sharpened word,
Another post to claim.
It hums beneath the glowing screen,
A quiet iron need—
“Another poem, another voice,
Another thought to feed.”
So out I pull from heart and bone
A verse half-born of strain,
I weigh the lines for rhythm’s sake
And bleed them into brain.
A podcast waits for numbered words,
An episode, a theme—
Another thought distilled to sound
To feed the poetry machine.
I grind my thoughts to couplets neat,
To quatrains straight and clean,
A measured pulse of syllables
For eyes I've never seen.
The algorithm drinks them down,
Each stanza, line by line—
It asks for more before the ink
Has settled in the mind.
And somewhere in the churning gears
Of cadence, craft, and scheme,
I feel the quiet turning point
Between the poet and machine.
For once I wrote to breathe my soul
Into the living page—
Now metrics tick like iron clocks
To pace the poet’s cage.
I fed it rhyme, I fed it form,
I fed it every dream—
Until the hand that writes the verse
Became the poetry machine.