{"id":11855,"date":"2016-09-28T08:00:03","date_gmt":"2016-09-28T08:00:03","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/ink.verticalplus.co.uk\/archive\/?p=11855"},"modified":"2020-12-09T15:13:28","modified_gmt":"2020-12-09T15:13:28","slug":"sam-murphy","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/inksweatandtears.co.uk\/archive\/sam-murphy\/","title":{"rendered":"Sam Murphy"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>&nbsp;<br \/>\n<strong>\u00a33.56<\/strong><br \/>\nTrotsky took the bus to the other<br \/>\nside of town for his friend&#8217;s birthday.<br \/>\nThe birthday was torn up by children<br \/>\nrunning around homemade ponds<br \/>\nin hand-me-down trunks and chocolate<br \/>\ncovered faces. Trotsky had become annoyed<br \/>\nby the exponential rate of his friends<br \/>\nhaving children like bacteria on an agar dish.<br \/>\nChildren changed them.<br \/>\nThey lost touch, lost hair and put on weight.<br \/>\nAt the same party a man in the corner,<br \/>\neveryone thought someone else knew,<br \/>\nread The Spectator,<br \/>\nwith the grace of a baby eating<br \/>\na peach on a train.<br \/>\nThe man scrunched every double sheet<br \/>\ninto a ball and read it in that order.<br \/>\nHe threw the balls at the nearest child.<br \/>\nReading The Spectator out of sequence<br \/>\ngave him an inadequate knowledge of current affairs,<br \/>\nbut a kaleidoscope image of what news could be.<br \/>\nThe man left the party.<br \/>\nOn the chair he left a biro and four tightly scrunched newspaper balls.<br \/>\nHe had half finished the crossword.<br \/>\nTrotsky completed the crossword.<br \/>\nHe never saw the man again<br \/>\nbut left him \u00a33.56 when he died.<br \/>\nIt was the least he could for his widow.<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p><strong>Sam Murphy<\/strong> is based in the West Midlands. Sam has recently completed an MA in creative writing at the University of Birmingham, with a focus on Poetry. He tweets infrequently @Sam_Murphy00<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>&nbsp; \u00a33.56 Trotsky took the bus to the other side of town for his friend&#8217;s birthday. The birthday was torn up by children running around homemade ponds in hand-me-down trunks and chocolate covered faces. Trotsky had become annoyed by the exponential rate of his friends having children like bacteria on an agar dish. Children changed [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[135,7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-11855","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-2016-poetry-picks","category-prose-poetry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/inksweatandtears.co.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11855","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/inksweatandtears.co.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/inksweatandtears.co.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/inksweatandtears.co.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/inksweatandtears.co.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=11855"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/inksweatandtears.co.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11855\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":12180,"href":"https:\/\/inksweatandtears.co.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11855\/revisions\/12180"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/inksweatandtears.co.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=11855"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/inksweatandtears.co.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=11855"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/inksweatandtears.co.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=11855"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}