All academics are hopeless
is a line I remember from Ed Dorn’s
‘The Land Below’. It synchs neatly
with learn how to spit unselfconsciously
as I walk up King Street, book browsing
on my way to work, Forbes’
‘Collected’ & ‘Lessons for Young Poets’
in dry, glittering fragments,
pure as snow.

El Niño has this habit
of leaving Sydney in buckets, rain
a paradise in theory, footpath literally conceptual
like free dope, sunshine in jingles
pegged right out of it, poems casually invisible
in torrents to the harbour.

Maybe it’s too late, the Americans now do
full spectrum dominance.

I see later the stanza reads
for an eye to offer coherence at times
you have to use your head as an arbiter,
a relief for it all.

I’ve had to change the line breaks above,
but that’s ok in a poem
about misleading principles, the cosmically
driven Earth. The sense is the same really—
if you happen to agree with it

the head is awake in the heart, as if art
weren’t just an upfront suntan, dust jacket
painted as a pair of secateurs.