I don’t trust the air domestically because the workers
are doled up in white suits and masks to remove the asbestos
in the ongoing demolition and I tell myself I don’t know
which way the wind is blowing and all this reckoning
on Shakespeare’s quality of mercy has left me dry.
They say laughter is the best medicine
so I walk into the pub’ where service is slow
and order a sandwich for two thousand and seventeen.
He’s not laughing so I ask for a pint.
I was looking for footpath 136 but the signeage
is on the other side of the Green.
A sunny day and a walk around the church cemetery
has recently left me disgusted in spring-heat
not by the list of local authority rules
the don’t drop this and the don’t do that and
photography must only be made by permission
of the doo-dah bearer,but by the private-public
shagging couple,banging away by the dead-flower bins.
Not even the public interuption of a few private moments
but the astonished look of embarrassed amazement
on her face,in the grass,at being discovered.
Moments later,listening to a blackbird on the bench
half-way down my glass of Ghostship
they walk by,happy as.
I know this by the recent hastily disgarded
red shoes I noticed she is now wearing
and the rose flushed blush on her cheeks.
Fucked.
Peter Handley
Peter Handley was born in a small village next to what was Sherwood Forest in the first decade at the beginning of the end of the age of Aquarius. He has been variously described as an arty farty twat and an Indian Oscar award winning actor and writer. He is published in numerous literary journals, trained, amongst other places, at Bristol Old Vic Theatre School and continues to tell stories and bullshit in all the right hostelries to promote positive growth all around the world and in his back garden. His first solo exhibition of works on paper is due out in a fancy gallery in Vienna late 2014.
