The Word Thief

The Word Thief

He waits where quiet settles in

Then slips beneatha writers skin

He lifts a line, a twist, a sound

And walks away, no dirt, no ground

He takes the rhyme, the sudden turn

The bit we bled, the hours we burn

He acts like no one sees him there,

we’ve seen the idiot

with lots more men out there

No ink on him, no scraps, no scars

Just echoes stolen from the stars

He never broke a line in two

He never saw a draft fall through

We write with blisters on the tongue

He writes with hands that don’t belong

And every word he pulls and bends

Will cut him deeper in the end

Let him build his crooked stack

Each stolen rhyme, a breaking back

One day it snaps, and when it does

He’ll wish he’d written like the rest of us.