Eight-line Poems

A Mechanical Boy

A Mechanical Boy

So I chose the words,
all three together as it happened,
a prophetic phrase by Manson himself,
bundling all that he was to be
and the horror that implies
with our modern unease and fear
of the future sentient robot,
AI personified.


Line count: 8
Free verse
For Express It In Eight, 05.06.23
Prompt: Grab the nearest book, turn to page 28 and choose three words you want to include in your poem.
Note: The book selected by this process was Chaos, Charles Manson, the CIA, and the Secret History of the Sixties by Tom O’Neill. The words chosen were “a mechanical boy,” a chilling phrase used by Manson to describe his childhood.