One more nightmare:

We lose the Writers’ Strike.

AI replaces us,

stripping a generation

of what we could have said.

Writers go homeless.

Wasted, our bodies roll

down the dusty banks of the river

to drown.

I awake in time to picket,

walking the plank.

Some of us survive

collecting plastic bottles.

We stuff them like fortune cookies

hoping our loglines

will float and be discovered.

The Pacific is so polluted

that our stories don’t wash up

on foreign shores.

My monitor stares back at me

like a murky tank.

It shatters in an earthquake.

Its fish surf to and fro

over the drenched lobby

of a dream factory

whose CEO is taking a vacation.

He rocks in a hammock somewhere

while AI dreams the dreams

that should be ours.