That Day in November
Byron Hoot

It is a November day of gray ambience,
a slow sip of alcohol lasting the entire
day, the slow slippage of clothes sliding
down, crumbled, discarded until
tomorrow as the conversation sounds
like a blues riff of loss and love
and the laughter in-between hiding
the fear and hope of today not lasting
forever as now is whispered in caress
and taste, the liquored breath of love
exchanged as if a resuscitation for what
does not want to end, the lie the denial
of all time and eternity and how sometimes
you have to be nearly dead to be brought
back to love again.  How slow this gray
November day moves, the snowflakes
falling the way the heart says, “And then?”