Issue Five

Ealhwine
fred spoliar
Cho A.
Vik Shirley
James Knight
Paul Hawkins
CipherMyst
Laura Davis
Matsuo Bashō
Ian Macartney

literary notebook

Ealhwine

Digitalis

weirdness of hands,

too many joints, tacky

weed joke i missed reading too quickly

petals bad in the contemporary sense

pouting, vivid. here, comparison

falters, foxgloves hang static

xanthopsic. piss tint but

make it funnier

with my human typo

blown pupils as if

looking were a wound

and that's it, my

human condition. let

the falling sickness,

the old name for epilepsy

be the new name for feed

or autism. they poison the water

in which they grow

and we drink from it. that's

anthropomorphism. or would be but

for servers threatening

febrile seizures. the dryness

of my humour. the sirocco

by any other name


ChatGPT-4o was asked to collaborate on a poem about digitalis (foxglove) poisoning and AI image & video generation.

fred spoliar

PROPERTY RIGHTS IN SPACE

Clean away with the option to reinvest.

Suicide in the long Honeybees run to me.

Agnes Varda to me the blooming heather

The heather to me. As if to herald a new era

sonic flight but you can’t hide

the furious dawn from me. You can hide but you can’t erase

property rights in space

You can fight but you can’t fly

feral doves to me

Golden Eagles Fieldmice Feral to me.

big bird with a big appetite

novelty of the dragonfly to me.

Large finitudes of

Stealing light from Bo Diddley, the only man for me.

Then repossessing the night.

Hunting me and taking away.

burrowing in Asserting itself In tunnel systems

is an infinite canvas to me.

Purple splendour It is pure

Angry, frantic resource to me

Canvassed

in the travelling light.

Full of fine rapids,

Full of fluid slides.

The prelude of neons

The flashing of colour fields.

There will be no more kisses

After you’ve gone.



The poet has combined GPT2 output with material from their own poetry notebooks.

Cho A.

Dreamscapes

and it doesn’t matter that the world is bad.

I’ve already spent a good amount of time trying

to imagine my dreams and their gravity to ground myself

I’ve already spent too much time

trying to think of dreams.

I’m getting bored with the concept

that everything has to be something

to be curious about.

a long time away from my birth country

it’s unearthly beautiful like me.

But I can’t think

of a new place to start.

so I’m asking you to repeat the dream
 


A Longformer model was trained from scratch on a dataset of 500 of the poet's own poems. From there, “composition codes” were created to generate the poem.

Vik Shirley

A Friend, or a Soul with Two Alibis

A friend disrupts the ghostworks,

blood twin of the shadow fax machine.

Spine hums Morse code through beetle shells,

twin moons in worn shoes walk with purpose.

He wears your jaw during pub disputes,

shouts "Eureka!" into the chip shop bin.

His soul is a torn manual,

stuffed in the drainpipe of your dreams.

A parasitic mirror, tapeworm thought—

my friend, my echo, my unpaid guilt.

We drink the same gin in parallel bars,

pointing out each other's spectres.

He’s the itch in my alibi’s pocket,

the whistler when sirens caw.

A hexed pigeon beats in both our lungs,

sharing coughs, spitting at the sky.

I met him amid TV static drizzle,

we shouted “I” until it became “we.”


ChatGPT was asked to write a twenty-line poem based on the Aristotle quote “What is a friend? A single soul dwelling in two bodies.” The AI was asked to write in the style of Mark E. Smith and to make the poem surreal with interesting word choices. The first version presented was made up of end rhymes. After asking the AI to create an unrhymed version, the poet made various changes including switching out dull, repeated, or too similar words, one remaining end rhyme, and an incorrect use of tense.

James Knight

Jean Baudrillard Got Fucked Up at the Foam Party

Get in the loft John’s got the worst hairline mucky fun all over

Look, you’re gonna have to mate

You’re gonna have to, mate

He whistles through popcorn teeth

I tell you what he’s done, he’s filled that up with the wrong gunk

It’s got the wrong gunk up in it everywhere and that’s gonna cost

It’s a pale bucket job I’ve said it

John’s hairline makes a beeline and they’re covered in hot wax screaming

Singing it out while the suction goes mental

This is gonna cost

Hey diddle diddle extraction inks the street white with over-write

John’s mates take the piss out of his overbite

Dead deer in road caution hot potato

Your house leaks traumas

Some bloke off his face staggering bareback over hot tarmac

Lending a certain swagger

The deer’s eyes look up its rigid legs are handles

Hurry up I’m coming Oh Christ I’m coming

John worries it’s gone rank

Your house fucking stinks

The popcorn teeth are eating us out of house and home they’re crackling through the Daytime

Closer squint it’s more like rampant alien life squeezing

I told John, I told him, get it looked at, that ain’t right, it might be catching


Smartphone screens go overripe

Text softens especially when you lick it


Don’t come running to me if your eyes can’t take the bite

She’ll be the first to say it’s tragic it’s a crying blame

Rancid Electra puking up death-jolts in the carbonised space

Gotta just keep sucking keep sucking it’ll never go away

John wrings the house and the slop goes hot

Cook little pot, cook!

I never done that, mate I never

All her little chickens too, eyes crossed out to represent

Their recent demise, even the flies turn their noses up at this sentimental scene

Here’s a spot! Will this house never be clean?

John’s in the doldrums now and everything is tragically sharp or would be if it weren’t

so Funny the deer the prying face the promise of everlasting over-

write


The poet wrote a sequence in response to images taken from online adverts for foam insulation extraction. The images are presumed to be AI-generated, given their nightmarish qualities and the prevalence of such fake images in the suspicious margins of online spaces.

Paul Hawkins

extract from Music For The Last Couple



A selection of the poet's original text was given to an AI image generator on playground.com to produce the accompanying image. This extract is reproduced with permission from the forthcoming collection Music For the Last Couple (Steel Incisors, 2025). Music For The Last Couple forms part of an ongoing series called On The Brink.

CipherMyst

How To Survive The Apocalypse

If you find yourself riding deeper into smog, here are some things you can do to save yourself:

  • Stop riding and get off your bicycle.
  • Call for help. Let someone know where you are.
  • Look for landmarks. Use buildings, bridges, and trees to guide you.
  • Avoid the sound of traffic. Roads can be deadly, even before you step foot in them.
  • Do not panic. This will make the situation worse.
  • Cover your mouth and nose with a cloth.
  • Close your eyes or they will become irritated.
  • Get to higher ground. Use your phone torch to guide you.
  • Avoid physical exertion, such as climbing a tree or a tall flight of stairs.
  • Do not breathe the smog. Do not use your lungs unless you absolutely have to.
  • Do not become thirsty or tired and disorientated.
  • Remain in your car with all the windows tightly wound. 
  • Drive as fast as you can. It’s important that you don’t slow down. 
  • Do not look out for pedestrians or landmarks. Burn as much petrol as you can. 
  • Remember that your life depends on this.
  • Remain calm and cover your face.
  • Close your eyes and drive very fast. This is your best chance for survival.


Instructions were generated by Google Gemini, then edited by the poet.

Laura Davis

Memory palace

I entered through a door I dreamed,

unmarked, perhaps imagined —

les murs parlaient en soupirs,

and the silence portait mon nom.

Corridors folded into corridors,

each lined with frames of forgotten faces,

fixed empty gazes, 

des horloges sans aiguilles.

A room of keys, but no doors.

A room full of echoes 

répétant ce que j’avais peur d’entendre:

"you never left this place"

I wandered into a chamber of scents —

cinnamon, ink, old paper,

rain on hot stone. 

« Je connais cet endroit »
Mais il s’effaçait déjà.

A staircase curled upon itself

like a memory resisting order,

chaque marche une époque —

childhood, doubt, love in ruin.

Mirrors blinked where windows should be.

I looked and saw

not myself,

but a thousand versions —all strangers,

mais tous moi.

« Il faut se perdre pour se souvenir »

a voice said, behind a wall.

I ran my hand along the stone —

warm, breathing.

“Are you looking for me 

or do you forget yourself while looking for me?”

No map.

No thread.

Seulement la boucle éternelle

des souvenirs that lie tenderly. 

Somewhere, always,

the door I cannot find,

que j’ai peut-être moi-même fermée

forgetting everything I have become.


The poet instructed ChatGPT to write a poem structured like a labyrinth, using English and French words, and then edited the text. She checked for plagiarism with Grammarly, and Copilot caught a grammatical error.

Matsuo Bashō

7 reconstructions


草の戸も

住替る代ぞ

ひなの家


I.

This thatched hut too
changes hands, a new household –
a doll's fleeting home.


II.

Even this thatched door
Watches dwellers come, then go—
A dolls' lodging place.


III.

This bound-reed door too
Watches the coming-going thread—
Straw-child's fleeting lodge.


IV.

This bound-door, clinging—
Sees the thread pass through, decay—
Straw-child’s rot-lodge.


V.

This bound door, steadfast—
Guards the thread’s bright pilgrimage—
Harvest-home’s soft loom.


VI.

Woven arch of grass—
Tending all who come, who pass—
Rooted cradle’s grace.


VII.

Grass-loom’s archway—
Tailoring all passing lives—
Unshaken rock-cradle.



DeepSeekR1 was asked to analyse and interpret Bashō's original haiku, and then asked to produce and original English translation. It was subsequently asked to translate this version back to Japanese, and then back to English, re-analysing and re-interpreting the poem each time. This process was repeated to produce each new translation.

Ian Macartney

HEAVENLY SUBWAY



The poet conceived of the ‘circle of fifths’ in music theory as a metro system, where each musical ‘key’ would be a stop on a circular route. The musical piece is comprised of ‘stops’, i.e. sequences in a specific musical key, which are made up of 32 ‘lines’. Each line features all seven possible chords in a randomised order. For example: C Major’s first ‘line’ is “I ii iii IV V vi vii”, and later you have “I ii V VI IV vii iii”. ChatGPT was asked to randomise this order, and then repeat that whole process 11 times, with the intent of creating chords that mapped on to these sequences of numerals. However, ChatGPT made mistakes: some lines had less than seven chords, and chords that should have been minor (lowercase) became major (uppercase). These AI-generated errors led to variation, surprise – poetics, moreorless. The poet then only based the song off the first sequence, looping the phrase and changing the scale of the piece via Garageband (an extra level of machinic intervention). While the poet is happy with the sound of HEAVENLY SUBWAY, they consider the score – those visual poems, punchcard-esque, marked by the errors of ChatGPT – to be the real thing: a documentation of their creative practice colliding with flawed computation.

About the authors

Ealhwine is the pseudonym of an AI trainer.

fred spoliar is a poet, researcher and education worker from London. They are the author of With the Boys (Spam Press, 2021), Goodlands (Veer2, 2022).

Cho A. is a writer in the midwestern United States.

Vik Shirley is a poet living in Edinburgh. Her first book was Corpses (Sublunary Editions, 2020) and her most recent is Some Deer. (Broken Sleep Books, 2024) She has PhD in Dark Humour and the Surreal in Poetry from the University of Birmingham.

James Knight is a poet, artist, performer and publisher based in the UK. Publications include Cosmic Horror (Hem Press), Rites & Passages (Salò Press), Machine (Trickhouse Press) and Void Voices (Hesterglock Press). [Website] [X]  [Bluesky] [Instagram]

Paul Hawkins is an artist. Paul isn’t sure quite what this might mean to you and this concerns him. Paul co-runs Hesterglock Press. He works mostly with words, paint, ink, photography, collage, sound & performance. Along the way he has been many things; squatter, tour manager, musician, freelance journalist, improvisor, collaborator workshop facilitator and a manager of an Elvis Presley impersonator. He studied the art of sleeping standing up and drinking lying down with nearly disastrous consequences; last count he’s moved on average every 11 months but only ever owned one tent. He owns the 59th year of Bill Drummond's life. He has collaborated with and had printed matter published with Julia Rose Lewis, Martin Wakefield, Peter Jaeger, Michael Harford (RIP), Bruno Neiva & Steve Ryan. He has had eight books published of his own work. Sometimes know as Bob Modem, Hesterglock and Eachwhat. Poem-Brutist. [Website]

CipherMyst is the alias of a poet who wishes to remain anonymous.

Laura Davis is a poet and textile artist currently based in Belgium. Her pamphlet, Have Needle, Will is out with Moormaid Press. [Website] [Instagram] [Bluesky]

Matsuo Bashō is the most famous poet of the Japanese Edo period, and is widely regarded as a master of the haiku. Bashō has been recognised for his works in the collaborative haikai no renga form, and for his travel essays.

Ian Macartney can be found online at ianmacartney.scot, but for how much longer?




This issue was edited by Dan Power, and published on 1 July, 2025.