Two Poems

IF JANE HAD BEEN A RENEGADE

[wpaudio url=”/audio/6_9/Hopcroft1.mp3″ text=”listen to this poem” dl=”0″]

Lizzy let’s run I know you’re
tired to tears of girdles for your hip-
flesh and mind-curves of buttoning
down your mouth to stanch the
bleeding out of rich verbal
life which you instead
replace with that
rosebud likeness all farce and
no face you’re getting to be so

yes Lizzy let’s run I see you’ve
had it up to your still-
high breasts with the full
ballooning of your own self out
beyond the realm of you to reproduce
maybe one-third per new soul of your
spark that dancing disdain for purse
strings and petty larcenies of
personality these tiny girls &
especially boys may barely learn
your ways so I mean

it Lizzy let’s run these
plowshare princes are growing
jowly in their shirtwaists and
meanwhile I hear they’ve got a blue
moon over Cheapside over
playhouse walls where all the
mewling babes are barred from being
carried in to exercise their essential
function yes what else the
wail without which
laughter instead will be what
encircles not encloses
us yes yes Lizzy let’s go

WESTWARD LOW

[wpaudio url=”/audio/6_9/Hopcroft2.mp3″ text=”listen to this poem” dl=”0″]

A little cocaine’s not enough to pad her back
pockets this time. And neither does the scrap of
metal she twists nervous above one frail knuckle
(hating where the skin sags, joints the first point

of betrayal as she’s counting up and down the years)
have enough tin to it by the pawnshop count to make
a dent. A dent in the certainty-uncertainty paradox,
the putrid scent of dread at knowing only what the

variables are: y and z loom ahead and at night it’s them she’s
falling away into wishing Greyhound were a champion
of seatbelts because the map of where she’s heading
is covered in mountain wrinkles and they say the

thirst for speed out there is something fierce. But she’s
going anyway, do you hear? Never mind the empty back
pockets, the days piled on days with no change. She’s
heading out of your, out of my, out of her own range.