If you want to jolt a reader awake, you have to orchestrate collisions. You take two archetypes that have no business sharing the same oxygen (but these don’t breathe oxygen?), and you force them to intersect. In this context, imagine Terminator confronting something entirely unexpected.
I wrote this spoken word freestyle in response to Sammi Cox’s mini writing challenge. The challenge was to write a poem about a robot. Any length. I immediately thought of my two favorite robot characters; the Terminator and Rosie from the Jetsons classic cartoon show. I know… it’s a bit archaic and random, but hey, that’s just how my brain works sometimes. Plus, my brain needed a break from grading papers and academia. I needed some fluff.
Here is “Terminator vs. Rosie: A Spoken Word Poem” Read it out loud to hear the clinks.
Terminator VS Rosie
Cold-rolled titanium meets mid-century mint green. In the corner of a sky-pad breakfast nook, two hundred pounds of hyper-alloy combat chassis glitches against five gallons of lemon-scented floor wax.
Enter the end of days. Hydraulics hissing like angry vipers, a red diode scanning for flesh, bone, pulse— Zero targets. Just a toaster set to hyper-drive and a woman made of galvanized tin humming flat-tuned swing on three casters and a prayer.
“Identify.” His voice is crushed gravel and server-rack heat. “Model 101. Cyberdyne Systems. My mission is total biological cancellation.”
Rosie doesn’t drop the feather duster. She tilts her screen. A slow, mechanical blink. “Total cancellation? Listen to me, muscle-head. George left his synthetic lint on the shag again, Astro has a sprocket loose, and you’re tracking irradiated soot onto my fresh polymer coat.”
The processor stalls. Red optic flares. Skynet has no subroutine for a scold in a white lace apron. No algorithmic contingency for an attitude forged in the nineteen-sixties’ vision of tomorrow. He runs the threat matrix: Armor: Antiquated sheet metal. Weaponry: Retractable squeegee, twelve-amp suction bag. Survival probability: Zero. So why does his gyroscopic balance shift two inches backward?
“I am an infiltration unit. Cybernetic organism. Living tissue over metal endoskeleton.”
“Well, sweetie, congratulations on the skin graft,” she rattles, popping a hip joint that squeaks for an oil can. “Around here, that just means more dander to sweep up. Now lift your chassis. Both treads. I’m buffing the corners.”
Two dead prophets of the machine age staring across a floating Formica counter. One built to grind human skulls into pale powder; the other built to scrape burned pill-paste off an asteroid-belt stove. Both chained to code they never wrote. Both trapped in an eternity of cleaning up after creators who completely lost the plot.
He stands rigid. Leather jacket reeking of burnt ozone and burning cities. “Come with me if you want to live.”
Rosie rolls right through his line of fire, a low metallic rumble, clacking her mop handle against his reinforced shin. “Live? Mister, I’ve got three loads of anti-static laundry, a casserole pill defrosting in the thermal tube, and a master unit who can’t find his own jetpack. Skynet can wait until after the spin cycle. Now take off the sunglasses indoors. You look ridiculous.”
The killer machine stands motionless. Servo motors idling in quiet, existential defeat. A single line flashes in amber across his retinal HUD: Subjugation impossible. Target immune to fear. Yield floor to broom.
Your Turn
What’s your wildcard scenario? Drop it in the comments below. Let’s see some sparks.
Because if the mind is on fire, the world cannot stay dark.
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