<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Friday afternoons<\/strong><\/p>\n the joy of Friday afternoons knowing that the sudden buzz the laughter and jokes the beauty we start to feel inside ourselves proud those Friday afternoons <\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n Martin Hayes<\/strong> was born in London in 1966 and has lived in the Edgware Road area all of his life. He has worked in the courier industry for over 30 years. He has had two collections of poems published, When We Were Almost Like Me, <\/em>and, The Things Our Hands Once Stood For.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Friday afternoons the joy of Friday afternoons knowing that it will only be 3 or 4 more hours before our shifts finish and we can walk out of there with our minds tingling and all of the wild blood everywhere the sudden buzz that ignites at around 3 or 4 o\u2019clock every Friday […]<\/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":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-16255","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-prose-poetry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/inksweatandtears.co.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16255","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=16255"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/inksweatandtears.co.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16255\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":16256,"href":"https:\/\/inksweatandtears.co.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16255\/revisions\/16256"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/inksweatandtears.co.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=16255"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/inksweatandtears.co.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=16255"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/inksweatandtears.co.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=16255"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
\nit will only be 3 or 4 more hours
\nbefore our shifts finish
\nand we can walk out of there
\nwith our minds tingling
\nand all of the wild blood
\neverywhere<\/p>\n
\nthat ignites at around 3 or 4 o\u2019clock every Friday afternoon
\nlike somebody has just flicked on a switch<\/p>\n
\nthat get a little bit louder, a little bit
\nriskier
\nas we can smell the weekend
\nnow marching uncontrollably forwards
\njust on the other side of that little hill<\/p>\n
\nthat our minds
\nand the fingertips that are a part of our hands
\nhave driven a sword through another one of their weeks
\nwithout this body they are attached to
\nlosing its job<\/p>\n
\nwhen the jobs that kept pouring down onto our screens all day
\nsuddenly become a trickle,
\nwhen the buzz of having to double-up and treble-up
\nand weave jobs into patterns that work
\nis replaced by the buzz of the upcoming weekend
\nleaving a control room full of men so heated up by anticipation
\nthat all of the atoms inside us start to move about faster
\nuntil they get so close to boiling point
\nthat we can see for the first time
\nthat the Earth is now round again
\nthat we can see for the first time
\nwhy the apple fell onto Newton\u2019s lap
\nthat we can see Mark Anthony\u2019s face
\nwhile he was giving it to Cleopatra
\nfeel the fingers of Beethoven
\nmoving over those keys
\nuntil it all comes so perfectly together
\nthe moment we put our foot outside that door
\nand walk up that road
\nfeeling like Beowulfs
\nout looking for our Grendels<\/p>\n