VisionsofOrion
Ellis Island Prayer
She dreams of the curious
gaze from another’s eyes.
The slow nasal drawl
of a foreign tongue – hard
pressed to pronounce a name
that sprouts from bloodied
tree roots of a distant soil.
Each minute screams eternity
in her solitary hours, a stasis
between the teeming portal
to a new world sanctuary
& a glass plate view from a
brownstone tenement window.
©️Orion Foote, 2022
Street Corner Scribes
My psycho geographic beat
hooks me up with street angels.
Icons of the literati’s inner sanctum,
such as Shakespeare Walk
or Bronte Street dot the city’s heartbeat.
They wave at me in hi-viz chalk white
characters—pointing this way & that
like cryptic runes on traffic point duty.
At mornings low tide, I wait for
ghost writers & their silent annotations.
©️Orion Foote, 2022
Incoming
I return to this
place on the cusp
of a pitch perfect
segue into summer,
swiping at echo loops
with a net in this
morning’s velvet light;
poised & ready
to swoop on sudoku beats
at the snap of a twig.
©️Orion Foote
Dinner with Sebald
Rapid eye gymnastics
in deep focus cut to
a table setting; below
spiky palm silhouettes
near a Key West shoreline.
I’m picking at Bavarian
brain cells over calamari
with lashings of tartare
& lemon. Knocking back
a bright Rosado as he
waxes of post war
hangovers jostling with
a yacht rock soundtrack.
Moon coloured foam
seethes under a Nor’
Westerly breeze surfing
the beach head—offering
an echo of washed up
bones & hushed voices
of the dead as dessert.
©️Orion Foote
Plainsong on Black Keys
In mornings feeble tones,
the belligerent lighthouse
plays hide & seek with
lilac bushels of cloud fluff.
Barbie pink petals fall
like day-glo showers
over a sea green sedan.
A furtive semi brève
crawls through the gap
of the drivers window.
It hovers like a tuning
fork, turning over
in mid song, as I chip
away at soft mounds
of snow – pushing silently
against the edge of
another vanishing coda.
©️Orion Foote, 2022
Are You Now, or Have You Ever Been
It might have been in
one of those three syllable
months – the ones with a decisive
stress point smack in the
middle; the hopeful quartet
that arrive towards the
latter part of the year,
announcing the onset
of milder days and less
troubled thoughts.
It was more a minimalist
Haiku collaboration than
an empty exchange of words.
You said Tin Nimbus was
on the burner, and awkward
isn’t there when silences
are shared and understood;
they breathe the same air.
Just for a second, I thought
we had nailed it in one, Geoff;
No need for a second draft.
©️Orion Foote, 2022
Branford Park, Just Quietly
Small clusters of Daisies
shimmy and quiver along
the embankment this morning.
Summer tides have made
their early return, cutting a swathe
through the valley’s epicentre,
where bird chatter makes its
half hearted attempt at small
talk with zesty oak leaves
rippling in the cool
of morning’s tepid breeze.
Each blade of grass will begin
it’s parched transition from
evergreen to dry tones
of a bilious citrine.
This is where the what is
and what has always been
will make itself known to
these curious ears, that
still pop in wonder with
youthful surprise.
Mashed potato clouds
swing by, adding their cheeky
grace notes and trills to
their cadenza ad libitum;
They know a decent
tune when they hear it.
©️Orion Foote, 2022
Encryptions
If only I could record
the inner workings at night
in 4K pristine transfer—micro
chips working sensory overtime,
burning disc to disc in
shimmers of HD excellence.
The nights carry stacks of
neuro abstraction data ripe
for the picking—teeming
with oddly familiar faces
that still retain their sense
of uncertainty; where youthful
sensations and heightened
nerves stand at glass doors with
white doves and jackhammers.
©️Orion Foote, 2022
Blues from Surrey
It’s a refinement of
aural linguistics with
a hint of chicanery.
Think torso extensions—a
flagrant third arm swoops
with meta particles running
the fusion ecstasy gamut.
Blades of metal tear
at delirium, as the grin
widens behind aviator shades.
It’s microtonal chaos, delivered
like pointillist warfare at
murmuring heartbeats;
he spits cascades of brain
matter over diamond dust.
©️Orion Foote, 2022
Closer Then
It constitutes the last
gasp of a wordless haiku—peering
through snow drift icicles on
a zen photographer’s window
pane in bright alabaster winter is
like watching stars melt inside the
expanse of a late period Rothko.
Ground German glass pierces
the fog of memory spirits—each
recalled and submitted for review
before imminent trial and sentencing.
Like the actor gazing through
a cigar haze at his cloudless
secretary, it is only what might have
happened between the now and
then— the minutiae of things
left undone until tomorrow.
They watch through vapours of
Pernod and cigarillos inside a
cork lined bar—the French essayist and
Scandinavian emeritus professor;
toasting each other over easy giggles.
©️Orion Foote, 2022
Visions of Orion Poetry 