Oisín Breen's "October" follows two lovers walking together on a cold, damp late-autumn night. The speaker is caught up in new desire. Learning about the other person feels like slowly unthreading a familiar coat, and holding their waist brings a thrill. The speaker notices how one arm can wrap all the way around them, and that smallness makes the speaker "hungry," a word repeated with open honesty.
The mood is intimate, charged and a little dizzy. The darkness shifts between anxious and drowsy, like heat resting on the eyelids, and the image of two "metronomes" keeping the same beat shows how closely the pair are matched. Near the end the walking stops, and the speaker can't say who turns first. That blurring suggests the two have become almost one. Neither wants to speak, so the poem leaves the moment unspoken, full of anticipation, right before something happens.