They say AI made my music,
like I typed in pain and pressed create,
like grief came with a download button
and trauma turned up neatly on a plate.
Fuck off.
The poetry is mine.
Every line, every rhyme,
every word I dragged out my head
at some stupid bastard time.
That’s my blood on the page,
my tears in every verse,
my life when it was already shit
then found a way to get worse.
A machine didn’t live my childhood,
didn’t stand beside that grave,
didn’t lose the people that I loved
then pretend that I was brave.
It didn’t sit awake at three,
with old photos on the screen,
trying to write the kind of truth
most people never see.
It didn’t raise my kids.
It didn’t bury my mum.
It didn’t lose my brother
then wonder what I could’ve done.
Those lyrics are one hundred percent mine,
not borrowed, bought or fake,
they came from all the bits of me
that life tried hard to break.
But here’s the truth you’re dying for,
the bit you think’s a crime,
I can’t fucking sing.
I couldn’t hold a note
if you taped it to my hand,
I’d clear a pub at karaoke
before they’d even booked the band.
So yes, I use music software,
I’ve never claimed I don’t,
I make it carry what I’ve written
because my own voice bloody won’t.
Poetry gets ignored these days,
left gathering dust online,
but put a beat beneath those words
and suddenly people find
the bloke who says he’s fine at work
but cries inside his car,
the woman scrolling late at night
who’s forgotten who they are.
That’s why I turned my poems to tracks,
to reach where poems can’t,
not for some smug little critic
saying what I am and aren’t.
I built the sound from what I love,
British grit and northern spit,
indie mixed with Britpop
then alternative rap through it.
I chose the pace.
I chose the tone.
I chose the way each sentence lands.
I spent hours fettling every track
until it sounded like my hands.
The style is mine.
The vision’s mine.
The creative choices too.
The software is a fucking tool,
same as a guitar is to you.
A camera doesn’t take the credit
for the picture that you shot.
A microphone didn’t write the song.
A paintbrush paints fuck all on its own.
So call it what you want, mate.
I know exactly what I’ve made.
I turned real life into poetry,
then gave the words a stage.
You’re busy judging how it’s built,
while strangers say it got them through.
Funny that.
The machine never lived a word of it.
I did.
And that’s the bit that bothers you.