Visions of Orion Poetry

Trash Talk at the Presser

Haney vs Kambosos Jnr – Press Conference

Trash Talk at the Presser

Y’all have to wonder about
their affectations of slam champ
and how they get to dish
out the straps these days.
It’s enough to make me want to
dig out my old highlight reels.

The way he enters the ring
all bug eyed with chest heaving,
juiced up to the max with post
modernist metaphors; his tree
trunk arms splayed so wide
he makes the door jambs flinch.

Suffice to say I was doing fine
with my usual ringside pew,
surveying the damage unseen
like some ancient retired
journeyman— until he showed
up in all his charlatan splendour.

Usually I’m good to let things
slide, but if he wants to trade
adverbs, play scrabble champ
with me or start to mess around
with sly check hooks or the old
Money May pull counter, he’s In
for a long night at the local A & E.

©️Orion Foote, 2022

Post Match Analysis

If you really want to know,
ask a dying person she said
sotto voce, while
teeming dross bucketed
from an embarrassed sky
outside my kitchen window.
Sweeping diagonally, deliberately
as if to make a point;
cut through all the crap.

While old Hughie pontificated
on the outcome of too many
turn-overs—chances gone begging;
no bottle at the breakdown of
play & let’s not mention the
gutless display in the scrum.
It’s a given that mouths will
explode at the next board meeting.

Perhaps in the end, that’s all
there is to the lamentable night.
Like learning how to mince words
over last night’s lasagna leftovers,
or trying not to mix apples with
oranges down at the old chows,
until you end up trying to live with
what you hoped you could live without.

©️Orion Foote, 2022

Foul Papers

At times, splinters of light
might penetrate the darkroom.
Sweeping like liquid; churning on
their solemn trajectory to
mingle alongside my gnashing
cells like silent hues of algae.

Sun-dried and parched beneath
the intrepid blaze of the sun,
becoming finely sated like alluvial
dust clinging together in bolsters.
Only to return under the deep
shroud of night, to lay inert with
drizzled shards and hubris, near
a dark and barren mound.

©️Orion Foote, 2022

Crepuscular

Crepuscular

Tonight, there will be no
reiterating of fictions or
anything of the sort.

No notes of nostalgia hinting
at a seismic shift to cooler
climes elsewhere.

It’s a drizzly dusk that enters
the frame at this hour
with it’s sly grating cadence.

Tonight, there will be no
moping nostalgia or any
neo-expressionist motifs.

Only the damp, prickly
needling of showers on the
driveway & the hearty tang

of garlic salt and warm butter,
smirking through the surface of
freshly dug new potatoes.

©️Orion Foote, 2022

Indicators

I pass the seconds
scanning every letter
that you arrange with
such inevitability—such
precise methodical order.

I watch them dissipate
towards the hollow
spaces that gather light
of foot between us.

It’s as if you can’t bear
the thought of them existing
only for and of themselves,
as I brace myself
for the oncoming season;
for your own too familiar
brand of tiresome weather.

©️Orion Foote, 2022

Bonus Scene

The rim of her glass
is a luminous sphere;
a blurred smudge of
moist crimson gliding
due north to her mouth.
It sweeps this lesser
God to another Calvary.

I trace from heel to
shoulder, shapely lines
Bergman himself would
have made a meal of,
would have entertained with
chic strokes of chiaroscuro.

It’s the perfect dash
of flim flam in a
sudden twist of plot;
the way she commands
the light as she performs
a laser sharp dissection
of the vast swelling scene.

©️Orion Foote, 2021

Night Memoir

You never know when
a word or two might stick;
come creeping through an open
window in these small hours.

It’s a nagging of letters,
where each tone follows
a broken rhythm—void of any
rhyme or reason except
it’s own shuffle towards a point
where one calls to another.

It’s mostly artefacts and
driftwood now; spoken
sotto voce in a mulatto dialect
that is oddly familiar and
sometimes understood by another.

But I’m marking time here;
falling over myself in the
pursuit of another cadence—to
stumble on a new meaning in the snow.

Shadow Commentary

Emile Griffith—photo©️Melissa Wells, 2007

The way he extracts data
from his glazed opponent
is a marvel of second sight.

It’s all in the knowing what’s
to come before the other knows.

It’s a cinematic play of sinew and
reflex; viewed through the
twin orbital tunnels of his
glassy eyed stare.

Covert Reconnaissance

The poet’s hat was adept in cerebral
matters; It kept his brain warm.
It formed a neat halo around his bone
carved dome & hid his mind from the
scrutiny of strangers—shaded his
brow from the sun’s hot daggers.

Over shifts in time he would come to learn,
that nothing could ever prepare one for the
heated rush, or the cruel disappointment
of one’s own internal monologue.

He had decided that it’s only what is
unsaid that holds any degree of truth.
He immediately set to work again; wired
his findings through with a detached
lethargy—he had assumed a new avatar.

Eliot’s Cross Examination

Isn’t it true, that your actions sprout
from bad nerves & a swarming hive
of raging ghosts—tenants of the wet
brain running riot in deep arrears.

I wish I could have wrapped you in
fine Taipei silk & soft feathers,
removed you from the scene of leaping
shadows amongst a baptism of winter.
Did you suffer by the grubby hand of fate,
or by a gurgle of cruel design.

Inquiries continued well into the night,
where bloodshot rainwater flowed
through gutters & his cowardly act
was grimly noted in the sergeant’s report.