Issue Five
Ealhwine
fred spoliar
Cho A.
Vik Shirley
James Knight
Paul Hawkins
CipherMyst
Laura Davis
Matsuo Bashō
Ian Macartney
Ealhwine
fred spoliar
Cho A.
Vik Shirley
James Knight
Paul Hawkins
CipherMyst
Laura Davis
Matsuo Bashō
Ian Macartney
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
If you find yourself riding deeper into smog, here are some things you can do to save yourself:
Instructions were generated by Google Gemini, then edited by the poet.
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.
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.
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.
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.