Jake Goetz


Farming kelp for a reparative state

            to search for the source 
of extraction in expression     
                  while economies collapse 
      over breakfast and Brecht 
                        isn’t here to Instagram 
            his Weißwurst in the sands 
      of Byron Bay   where 5G conspiracies 
                  radiate foaming breakers  
                        into COVID tanks moaning
      like air being conditioned 
out the back of a Dan Murphy’s   
                  and the sexuality
            of machinery in its lust for
                        extinctions   that anti-creation 
            search for bliss   cum and oil   warm 
                  and thick   dropping onto the stomach 
      of our anthropocentrism   where we is a   
            producer of I solutions   
jogging in city parks feeding the realisation  
      that all fictions now can be refracted 
                  into facts   as all frictions struggle 
            to depict truth as an act   
                              listening now
                     as a baby cries to Nepalese singing
        soothing the air above Sydney   the morning 
                        like an ibis smudged so brown 
 	it’s as if it was used to sweep
                  the chimney of a Victorian terrace   
      where Tibetan flags hang above a sign 
            that attempts to 

                                     STOP 
                                     COAL 
                                     SEAM 
                                     GAS

                        and perhaps 
                 all one needs is a dream of the west
                              as a mosquito on the earth’s arms
            seeing how much it can suck
                  before being whacked   
                        and so to be a bird of thought 
            edited by nothing but sun
                  in the memory of Pleistocene ice 
      melting   revealing sandstone cliffs  
            that form valleys of ironbark 
                        and eucalypt   rivers that flood 
down escarpments to shape 
                  South Pacific estuaries  
            and how all these ideas are just volcanic   
                        magma in the feet of water   
      watching two magpies circle and descend   
             dropping like an absence of rain 
                              into the shower’s bucket   
                   startling the hair clip of a dragonfly 
hanging from the memory of a bush of hair   
                        its bright red tail denser than any 
                                    word-colour suggests    
          dipping its tail in a clear forest pool   
                               cool on a 40 degree day   
                 as you lay back into a place   
             where words are like kelp 
                        tossed beneath a wave   
                  sequestering carbon
                              for a reparative state


Winter song

            through the purple hue 
of dawn   small clouds are thrown  
                       from the lungs of joggers 
      upon church steps   finding in their feet
                  a choir that sings
the ways in which we make
            meaning milk   
      rhymed yet enjambed
                       spawning across fields 
dissected by ideologies 
                             only to be re-united 
            by snow's socialist approach 
      to economics   as cows that may as well
                 chew through their own flesh   
            watching how people defend 
everything a Glockenturm suggests    
                             the way sunburst drinks up 
             the iced reflection 
                       of the Liban Quarry’s limestone pit   
                  excavated by 800 Polish Jews   
                             on the outskirts of Krakow 
              or on a lone night in a Copenhagen bar   
                  listening to a drunk sing
                        Billy Joel’s Piano Man   
is this what we mean
      when they speak of freedom?
                 notes streaming off like rain 
            against the window 
                        of a Berlin bus   
             considering the Asr prayers 
of Moroccan memories like a shawl that
                  wraps and hugs as a thought 
      is nothing more than the passing of time               
                                   drifting away  from   the    centre   
                       language the intertwining 
of its fracture   history in the continuity 
            of teeth   hearing fruit bats screech 
through the Shire’s gentrified twilight   
                        swimming in the warm beach 
      of a coffee in a Wroclaw café   
           outside a sparrow darts 
      between trees   while yellow elephants 
                       sit upon a fence   undressing clouds 
                  with their trunks   what they reveal
           is the revelation revelling in its own undoing  
                             i.e. that each person’s mental confinement 
summarises nothing but pink strippers 
                       whipping the dead meat 
                                   of a colonial sheep  
           standing at the Lidl check-out   
                            beside a man who stinks of piss 
                  and who with his last euros 
      buys some beer in search of everything 
                        addiction can afford him   
a tram bell rings and a couple kiss   
                  laughing between bites of falafel  
       walking cobble stoned streets crapped on
                        by a history of horses 
            and working class love     
                                    their feet out of synch 
                   with the crow that picks 
                               the breadcrumbs in the gutter   
      in the glasses a waitress clinks 
                       not thinking of how long 
the sun’s routinely made its visits   anxious perhaps 
           for each sensation she’s missed 
      in saving money for experience     
                        perhaps shocked like the woman 
      who looks into the eyes of her lover curious   
                                    yet certain 
                    that fear teaches more than anything
and doesn’t this make all the difference
                       different to all the lines you’d thought 
            were the same?   
      take a long stretch of sand 
                        in a war torn dream 
drowned by an imagined Pacific   
                 or night rising like a wave 
      as a group of alpha-males hold each other
                        by the shoulders in the street   
            howling verpiss dich into the illuminated windows 
 	      of Brno city   and to realise   
that all of them have cried themselves
                                    to sleep at least once   
                        in the dark of indecision
                  in the dank of hostel bunks   
                                    and that understanding 
      means nothing more than to stand under 
                       something and look up     
                             to consider time in the long hour hand 
of Graz’s Uhrtum   time in something no greater 
            than yourself   or to lose control maybe 
                        yet still be able to swallow 
     and not throw up   for how easy it is to give one's self
                   to a long unfaltering surge   confusing reason 
with years   geography for tradition   or a wash 
                                     of shopfronts with being old 
           and forgotten   pissing and shitting language 
                       between layers of glass and cement   
where trees are ornate furnishings 
           not the lungs we breathe from   
       nor the woman who stands 
                        in the middle of Odeonsplatz 
            and puts her teeth to a wurst   
                  while the sound of a phone 
leads her into another room   a meme   a god even 
                 for there are voices that lean in the wind
      and we fall to their singing   
           like snow in the Tyrolean mountains
only to feed the rivers in spring




Jake Goetz lives by a drowned valley estuary on Gadigal land. He has published 
one book of poetry, meditations with passing water (Rabbit Poets Series).
 
 

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