Writing Prompt

Strawberry field

Life’s unreal

Living machines

Nightmare dream

Stark reality

Dim banality

Robot cops

Laughing stock

Beatles song

Forever gone

Where did it go

Lost in the snow

Gone

Wrong...

Soon, we will not bend

our backs to pick strawberries,

robots will instead...

Do the strawberry fields become sickened

When the robots join in the fun

Does their sweet scent of berry

Become overwhelmed by a sterile one

Does the cold metal run across the soft dirt

Two objects not seeming to meet

Does the pink strawberry juice

Get crushed under a robots feet

Woven baskets become a bore

A job to humankind

But for the berries it was their world

Their home and lifeline

Now t...

The belts turn with a rumbling as the strawberries move swiftly on from the field, a team of twenty robots making swift work of the picking.

But why?

Because the children don’t want to pick their own anymore. They grow them in seconds on their screens.

Because parents don’t want to drive to the country anymore.

Because farmers couldn’t afford to live anymore and were replaced by the new moguls...

Wear that dress.

That dress with those little strawberries.

Red like your blush.

Red like your blood.

So warm, so warm.

Sunkissed like the strawberry fields we know so well.

Your skin is cool, your flesh hard.

Not as hard as it is to fuck you.

It’s cold, metallic pitter patters as I remember that change and change you wanted.

Why?

Why must I have to feel this body of yours that...

Strawberries & Robots

In Grandma’s garden, wild and free,

Where blossoms dance and bend with glee,

A fruity world, a wonderland,

With vines that twist and roots that stand.

Between the peaches, apples bright,

And rows of greens in golden light,

A curious hum began to grow—

A sound both new and strangely low.

From metal limbs and gears so tight,

The robots wandered, beaming bright.

With blinking...

Rust and rot sing a song together

About water and growth

They ask if the leaves matter

When they decide to go

Wind and its instruments respond

By simply brushing through

Taking more and then leaving

Taking more and then leaving

And death chimes in, as a great harmonizer

Took everything broken

Before it broke down in matter

Wondered not if it mattered

Wondered not about care

But wh...

I have wandered through this lifetime –

A robot in a human world.

Never knowing what it’s like,

to feel something real,

something beyond the cold hum of circuits,

something more than the empty ache

of silence filling vacant spaces.

And then there was you…

Crashing through metal like a wrecking ball,

Rewriting the code inside me,

And sparks flew from every circuit

As I slowly roared to life.

I h...

Strawberry red blood

Spills from my wounds

Reminding me

That I’m a human,

Not a robot.

If a robot

Is what I was,

Strawberry red blood

Would not spill

From these wounds I call

My own.

Smashed strawberries

Flow through my

Mortal veins,

A garden

In mt body.

I am not a robot

For a robot has no

Smashed strawberries

Flowing thick

Through their veins.

Strawberry red blood

In place of

Coding and wire...

What does it mean to be inanimate?

In the eyes of most,

It means to be lifeless.

But wait.

A sweet strawberry grows from a flower

And bursts into a bloom of flavor

And juice

And sweetness

As it dies,

It drops seeds,

Fragments of its former self,

And creates a family.

That is not lifeless.

But a strawberry cannot move

So it is inanimate

But a robot

With a cold, hard shell

Cannot think

Or feel

Or ...