in the early morning a siren is prolonged by quiet wakes me into a breeze that cuts west to Mount Coot-tha catching the sun in a golden-green its transmission towers muffling the city to the honey-bee Dreaming and myself here an unlocating waiting for a bus by the Vietnamese bakery watching a school girl scroll through the cry of a crow in the way an epiphany is so easily silenced by a voice a movement that turned to blankets intertwines each passing car the if only streets were paved with the collective time it takes for the world's population to work a week perhaps then we'd realise that these conditions are nothing more than Clive Palmer on a bill board or the cross- hatching steel of the Story Bridge glimpsed through a light fog recalling the Golden Gate between a break in trees in the San Joaquin Forest amidst dry-earth infused with pine watching children pass singing buenos dias madre tierra twirling their hands and kicking up dust columns of light between redwoods buenos dias madre tierra they sung water trickling beside me to the whistling of a blue jay the booming of a plane between the hydraulics of this bus of iPhones that reward workers like cigarettes on their break as children work 12 hour days in Congolese mines to provide the cobalt for phone batteries for people like data yet tangible as plastic to be blown through Brisbane’s CBD past that man sleeping outside the 7/11 on Adelaide Street while in Canberra the economy is dressed in human skin given eyes ears and lips a reputation in the literal interpretation of a dream as if one could fail to understand that unemployment is a fact unless you believe in socialism or know that it’s not ideas that terrify us but us who terrify ideas take that woman who dressed in white stood in the spring sun of San Francisco’s Chinatown a sign hanging from her neck The Chinese Communist Party is Satan and at the corner of Warner and Ann in the early morning on the way to work faint taste of petrol in the air
Jake Goetz's writing has recently appeared, or is forthcoming, in Overland, Rabbit, Sickleave, Mascara and Plumwood Mountain. His first book, meditations with passing water, a long-poem written alongside the Maiwar (Brisbane River), was recently shortlisted for the QLD Premier's Award for a work of State Significance. He is the editor of the sporadically-published magazine, Marrickville Pause.