Indigo, Indigo, on the fifth of November. Deep blue and a hastening moon, and something about a Fawkes and something about an explosion, and a revolution, but that was all along time ago, somewhere between history and myth where all good tales lie, and lie.

All of that and all of the rest on the periphery as I walk home, dilly up the hill, in flip flops and a hoodie, shiny of toenail and recently fucked with the nearly tumescent moon at my back and a licorice dark saddness twining my heart like an edible ivy. The raw garlic on my breath should cleanse my blood and ward off the suitors and vampires alike. Fall into old rituals with old friends, stand at the stove over a slab of meat like as near to a year of Sundays with him hadn't ever passed, like an extended reverie as I stand testing the rareness on one leg, bad ankle cocked on my standing knee.

Mild in November, while the rest of the country shrugs off the frost, and shrugs into coats I shrug out of my sweatshirt, like we sloughed off the sheets, at the beach break. Sun kissed and beard scorched in this short reprieve, before he goes. And to some it may be a great exercise in heartache, a deep pull from the well of the ludicrous, but I have made my peace with the critics. Best I figure, I'll take the love with the licks for those scant precious hours of happiness, tinged with the inevitable maddness of loss. In a matter of days, a mere couple of weeks and he will be gone and so will I. I repeat it like an incantation, he is gone, he is gone, he is gone, even when he has wrapped his body around mine and I have disappeared into his breast, he is gone, but this, this moment, this kiss, last night's martini, the way he looked at me askance, that, that is mine, it is all mine. Mine to savor, or mine to forget, mine to horde and mine to give, mine, mine to pitch to the stars, soft and blue, deepest indigo, as colossal as the sea.