Long ago, people thought Lobster

Was an extravagant thing to eat.

So with shrimp

So with Frog Legs

So with Fish Eggs

So with Goose Cirrhosis-livers.

 

Now, we just eat gold.

Tell me we’re not stupid extravagant.

 

As a writer…

We all know this feeling,

You have a great story.

Just awesome.

Wrote five pages, it’s working good.

And you forgot to hit Control S.

 

Or, you wrote the greatest poem

You’d ever written

Etc…

And suddenly the program crashes.

There it is, you can’t go into the backups

Because they crashed too.

 

Then, there’s crap you wrote

That you just didn’t like.

Just crap. Crap. Crap. Crap.

 

Then there’s cult stuff.

Crap. Crap. Crap.

Nobody wants to write a new book of Mormon.

 

Then, of course, there’s just crap.

Crap you wrote, just wasn’t feeling it

And it needs to go too.

 

Then, there’s crap you wrote

That you just don’t agree with.

It’s neither wise, nor certain why you wrote it.

 

Then there’s crap you wrote

Because you were having a little bit of illness that day.

Call it that. Let’s not go further.

Crap, crap, crap.

 

Then, there’s whole entire books

Worth of crap. They need deleted to.

 

Then there’s the crap that you don’t want to delete

Because it has some sentimental value.

Those you keep.

 

Then there’s the crap that other people don’t like

And you like it, but you get so frustrated

That nobody likes it, so it gets deleted too.

 

Then there’s that masterpiece

That in a moment of absolute absurd stupidity

You delete. And then years later

You wonder why you deleted it,

And you still can’t think of a good reason.

 

Then there’s the thousands of words

You deleted in editing,

Often making it worse

Rather than better

But everyone is convinced

Because their hand is now in your pot

That it is better.

Sooner or later,

That authentic vibe your writing has

Is gone, and someone else is there

Nagging at you.

And, so, it gets deleted.

 

Then, there are hundreds,

And hundreds, and hundreds

Of words that you delete

Because you just know they ain’t gonna sell.

 

Then there’s that feeling that you have your pearl

But you’d rather throw it back into the ocean

So the people at the markets don’t undersell you.

Those… you ought not to delete.

 

A song, old,

Making different melody

To the form of its design.

Different, knew,

Yet, it is my theme song because it is what I do.

 

What is old

I put to their modern forms

With a different melody

To the stringed instruments I choose,

Those words, new

It’s my theme-song because it is what I ought to do.

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.

There was a man in black

Who sung of Gabriel’s Trumpet;—

A prophet he was, who sung sad odes

Of those about to die.

 

Some elves peeped through the walls

Spying the songs he’d sing.

He sung his sad odes

But the elves, having power over time

Went back and sung them

First.

 

Then Albion’s Queen saw this thing;—

 

When times are tricked,

She investigates the matter.

 

She found the man innocent,

And therefore, let him sing his sad odes.

For, none could understand his odes

When the elves sung them.

They needed the man in black

To understand.

A thought crossed my mind today about Plagiarism.

Suppose a Russian author stole my best book.

Then, he gave it to Reddit.Com to eviscerate.

Then the trolls eviscerated it,

Making it incomprehensibly different

To my masterwork.

Would he have really stolen my idea

If it’s totally different?

Sure, there might be zombies

Underground tunnels and people living inside of Subway stations

But, truthfully, nothing is the same.

Is it truly plagiarism

Or is it high art?

 

Michelangelo sculpted sculptures

Of the Greek molds and casts

Making reproductions at first

Which were in similitude with their

Original art.

With a novel, you cannot do this.

Rather, elements or ideas get borrowed from one author

To another, and then get shared

Passing down ideas from one person to the next.

It’s a lot like sculpting.

Yet, I have a hunch someone scalped my one manuscript

And wrote a few famous novels.

I’ve looked at them,

Seeing them all over the place.

They are not my stories.

Just some of my ideas

Which I ought not own.

Surely, I write myths about Robin Hood

And Beowulf, stories which are shared.

I write stories about Iranian myths

I’ve never seen my words in print.

It’s always someone else’s story

Which borrowed my ideas

To make theirs.

How they get it?

Who knows… but it’s not my story.

 

Where we confront problems

Is when I cannot publish my story

Because of them.

When I cannot have my words in print

And be read, because they plagiarized me.

All I care about are my words,

And my stories.

I copy Robin Hood and Medea

I copy some elements of Vampires and Werewolfs.

And I make my own stories with them.

It’s called High Art…

 

My story is not in Russia,

It is not in their Subway Stations,

It has really nothing to do with a famous author

I was enlightened to today.

My story is not in a Maze,

My story is not about men shrinking

To have lots of money…

Though each of these

Have borrowed something of mine…

Should it be copyrighted?

Maybe they came about independently

Because maybe archetypes exist.

Maybe notions produce art.

Or, maybe someone copied my manuscripts

And went to Reddit.com

And changed them.

Regardless, it’s not my story.

I’m flattered someone would make their own

So long as it’s not Capitol City

Or my Freelander Civilization;

So long as the themes are not American

And the love story is about Marc and Erin.

 

Surely, I don’t care about a wood carved bear

Because my story has nothing to do with a maze,

Though it is a metaphor about hell.

I did think about shrinking men who wanted to enrich themselves

With shrinking, namely, that’s why they have Galaxy Rings

In Fairyland.

But, it’s not my story.

 

Stories need shared,

And that’s why I love Japan

With tons of Gundam Animes

All by different producers.

Just, the guy who made Gundams should make some money

On it too. That’s all I’m saying;

People ought to read a work if it’s quality.

 

But, they don’t. And a Copyright system

Isn’t going to fix that.

Really, human corruption has been around for a long time

And intellectual property is airy.

An invention of a log splitter,

If the man who was the genius behind it

Didn’t get paid,

But some other thief did

I call that corruption.

If both men got paid,

But one made a Ford

And the other a Chevy,

And the other a Honda

And the other a KIA

I call that capitalism.

So long as men can eat from their labors

Which they do under the sun.

 

Just don’t steal my Ethos

And we’ll be fine.

Don’t steal my Pathos

And we’ll be fine.

Don’t steal my Logos

And we’ll be fine.

Let Kairos be damned

It’s Because of him

I’m poor.

He held no real title.

He turned over a new leaf.

He went from being the most evil

To a righteous son at least.

 

Now I perceive the tale

And realize something true:

The Hero is now the villain

While the Villain has turned good.

 

The Titular Prince—

I am quite impressed with

How the Gospel is here so shown—

Not that a sermon can be preached on it

But it shows how bad men can really grow.

 

For the Prince had taken his warships

And so destroyed many moons;

While the hero, that good man

Had defeated him to prove.

The prince had stolen many lives

Many trillions, it is true.

But, the good man’s good

Turned him to here prove

His strength in battles crude.

 

His goodness had corrupted him

For evil he nare understood.

Thus, his pure heart nearly destroyed him

And his whole entire troop.

 

The prince, with family, with lover and child

Saw this righteous man so careless

Gambit his whole world for vile

Tests against a stronger foe.

For the righteous man

With no sin, had only wanted to test

His strength in battle; in battle lust

He went to beat his many foe.

 

Yet the prince, who tasted great evil—

Now slowly turned to good—

Knew that this was wasteful,

For at war’s outbreak would

The righteous man now see

He wanted to test his strength of army

But nearly plunged his nation to the sea.

 

Finally, the good man,

Believing himself pure

Turned himself to a Baalim

So truthfully sure

Of his own good deeds.

 

The wicked man, who tasted evil

Knew how wicked he

Our hero became.

A titular prince is just a pauper,

So he spent it with his family.

 

Thus is the message

Of the gospel of hope.

Great good which never knew evil

Will in the darkness grope.

For a heart that does not wise

Know that they are bad

Will in the end be callous

And also be God’s foe.