November will come

This is no season of the quartered orange,
squirting and splitting in your exquisite fingers.
Like the leaves.
You’ve gone,
like the carbon-dusted yellow leaves.
Last night I dreamt of the dark dogs
nuzzling and tearing at the refuse sacks
that languished in doorways,
that bled like cunts when they slit them.
I am hunched in the laptop’s glow.
Behind its hum
I can hear them now in the frozen streets beyond my window
their whispers drifting through the alley ways
their claws clicking on the footpath

Billy Ramsell