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