Salt tears erase all traces of the unexpected.

Please tick this box if you do not wish to never unduly yet perhaps often nonetheless rigorously deny receiving a complete absence of content, love letters in the sand, a consenting genital, coordinates, names and a weapon; hats, a blow up doll with your face on it, breath down your back (lukewarm and sticky), iodine, the scent of hiding, postal meats, a list of everything you wanted to be, none of the above, plus the occasional Catfishing scam.

Please tick this box if you do not wish to know.

Please tick this box if you do not wish.

Andrew Blair

Andrew Blair is a writer and performer based in Edinburgh, whose credits include Gutter, Valve and Auld Enemies project. He hosts the show Poets Against Humanity, and co-curates the Lies, Dreaming podcast.

Robophobia

Genius solver of Sudoku,

chess grandmaster that

cannot pick up pieces,

arms that dent the wall

but fail to find the handle

on a cup, wheels that need

a nice flat floor,

turning for just two hours

until the battery’s flat.

Unzip this plastic skin,

search for ambition

in the gears and motors.

You put a god in my machine, one

that chooses where the lightning

strikes, the cancer grows.

Make it a traveller from another village

where they do things wrong,

and therefore snatch

your history and friends

change your language, kill your songs.

Why scratch at that until it bleeds?

A simple ant, a slug

does better in the world

in getting food, producing ants

and slugs to carry on.

Oh, you argue, soon

you’ll have all that and

then they’ll be a threat.

Have you not seen

how we climb different trees

to get us closer to the moon?

Ruth Aylett

Turing

The ghost in this machine is his:

its processors

silicon flesh of his logic.

From here to there in steps.

He asked,

Must you always

eventually arrive?

Tracking those steps,

an impossible downward stair

looping into itself but