Plagiarism Defined

My stories are mine.

They are no one else’s.

Brittos fights Medea;

And he fights Thor.

He fights the Grea.

These battles are not mine.

 

For a hundred battles

I hope Brittos has with Medea

Thor and the Grea.

In Haiku,

Iambic Pentameter,

Tetrameter,

Trisyllables,

Hexameter,

Free Verse

Blank Verse,

Trochees

Spondees

Villanelles,

Canzones,

 

What distinguishes my work

When the story is borrowed from someone else?

Wordings, feet

Themes, morals,

Ideas, notions, metaphors

Similes, idiosyncrasies,

Nuanced meanings,

Diction,

An Ethos,

Schemas,

Scholarship and Research,

My own life story.

 

For truth,

What distinguishes my writing

Is my spin on the story.

 

The Fifth Angel’s Trumpet

What makes it mine?

Capitol City

Freelander Civilization

Marc and Erin

The histories,

The civilizations,

The words,

The speech,

The colloquial

The themes,

The elements.

 

Plagiarism is when you take

Some of this

And then add your own.

When you take Freelander Civilization

And make it so I can’t eat.

When you take Brittos

And make his story inferior

Just so you can make a dime.

 

My story of Brittos is mine.

Brittos is not mine.

Medea is not mine.

Nuclear War, Underground Cities

Zombie Apocalypses

Utilitarianism, World Wars

Russian and Chinese conflicts

These are not mine.

These are simply archetypes.

These are stories latent in the cloud

Of Platonic Forms;

Why Plato despised them,

Yet they are his best proof.

 

But, at the end of the day

Plagiarism is when you make it so

An author cannot eat

Because you took what was his

And made it better.

When you took what was his

And made it more appealing.

When you took what was his

And made it your own.

Plagiarism is when you will

Throw an author in the prison of poverty

Without giving him the credit he deserves

Because someone else had better timing.

 

Medea sounds like “Media”.

Therefore, a metaphor about it is not mine.

But, what is mine are my words;

And to take from them, or add to them

Would be like putting The Book of Enoch

Into the Bible. It is without a doubt

Abhorrent because it is not God’s story,

The book of Enoch.

We have a council at Nicaea

To determine what goes into our God’s story

And believe these divinely inspired prophets

Sat and determined what was to be in there.

What is not in there, it doesn’t belong.

As much as you don’t take a story

And call it God’s Holy Divine writ

You don’t take what is another Author’s

And claim it is yours.

 

It does not mean you can’t write a psalm.

It does not mean you can’t write a tall tale.

It does not mean you cannot write 100 tall tales.

Because John Henry can only be done so many ways;

Paul Bunyan can be made a metaphor

For the Preacher’s Man famous for cutting down trees;—

This is something people can come to on their own.

But when you see my work

And meddle with it,

And make it your own—

I don’t mean borrow from some of its ideas;

Heaven knows that’s the craft of writing:

The Fifth Angel’s Trumpet borrowed from Starship Troopers

It borrowed from my High School Econ and Government class

It borrowed from my history class

It borrowed from conspiracy theories

It borrowed from science class

It borrowed from child’s play

It borrowed from a lot of elements—

But it is none of these things.

My child’s play did not develop a civilization.

My science class did not invent a skiff.

My history class did not have three additional World Wars.

My Economy and Government class Did not lay down the foundation of Freelander Civilization;

Alex Jones did not invent conspiracy theories,

Starship Troopers was not a movie chronicling a civilization.

 

With Brittos,

It was all elements latent in the air.

Television, lusts for the good life, nightmares

Monarchies, Britto founding England,

Greas personifying the sea,

Idolatry, the Hortus Conclusus

Desiring love,

Overcoming the world’s desire

For a humble existence…

Not much is beyond the scope of what is common archetype

Or the prevailing truths seen…

They guide the hand of this author

Therefore it is the words, the style

The meters, the rhymes.

The feet, the Iambs, the trochees,

The Third Rhymes, the punching sixth lines

The actual wordings. Those are mine.

I cannot claim ownership of the story

Though it is slightly original.

Brittos fights the Sea,

But being the founder of Great Brittain

What else would Brittos fight?

The Grea has no description in Bulfinch’s Mythology

Just a slight notion that it is a personification of the Sea:

What do I do? The founder of Britain must fight the sea.

And fight he does, but the sea is within…

And the Mighty Men of David

Slay 100 men with spear.

What is external in the Old Covenant

Is internal in the New.

The external life in the Old Covenant

Is the internal life in the new.

I cannot claim ownership over that.

It is there, and if I did I’d be a tyrant.

I cannot claim the Nethanim are mine

Because the Nethanim are bards

Who tell tales of mighty victories.

In the story they are warriors

In real life they are the bard.

I cannot claim ownership over that

Because it is there to be discovered

In the prevailing truth.

I sat in church, and saw a conference

On the Mighty Men;

I saw it for a few days

I left, and I had to make sense of it.

I did: It’s called Metafiction

And I cannot copyright that.

But, nobody should let me starve

By saying they wrote it first

Or better; I need to eat

And these stories I came to on my own

Because they are there to be discovered.

 

I suppose one cannot copyright an archetype.

They can only copyright their story.

And that is what a plagiarist does.

He copyrights another’s story.

Therefore, let this byzantine definition stand:

 

You cannot copyright a story of another person.

But you cannot copyright an archetype that belongs to everyone.

And with my recent poetry, it is all archetype.

Therefore, I own my words, and those are what I own.

 

You cannot copyright the truth and claim it only belongs to you.