This is the tenth piece in my Ambrose Bierce-inspired "Devil's Year" series of poems.

There is not a whole lot to be said about this piece, other than the fact that I have always felt October (especially the first three-quarters of the month), to have a sort of odd, in-between place feeling to it. There is this sense of empty waiting for you-don’t-know-exactly-what.

It is like the quiet, deserted station briefly outside of time and reality, where you’re waiting for a train that might, at some time be coming…

Or perhaps, might not.

There are also two musical influences in the piece. The first comes from the title and feel of U2’s second album “October”, which came out in October of 1981, and represents the band when they were still hungry and full of (unforgettable) fire, and waiting for… something. That something, of course, came two years later, when they released their third album “War”, and became a worldwide phenomenon.

The second comes from the very recent passing of musical legend Tom Petty on 2 October 2017, and from two of his songs in particular. The first of these is Even the Losers from his 1979 album “Damn the Torpedoes”, and the second is The Waiting, from his 1981 album “Hard Promises”.