Joe Hoppe
whoppe@austincc.edu

W. Joe Hoppe teaches English, Humanities, and Creative Writing at Austin Community College. He’s been at ACC since 1996. After earning a Bachelor’s Degree in Communications from the University of Michigan in 1984, W. Joe spent a year working as a journalist before realizing its inherent evils. This prompted him to become involved in social services, and he worked in homeless shelters and halfway houses in Minneapolis from 1985-89. In ’89 W. Joe and Polly Monear moved to Austin because it was a lot warmer than Minnesota and so he could go to graduate school.

W. Joe graduated from the University of Texas with an MA in English and a Creative Writing Concentration in 1994, and subsequently received a James A. Michener Post-Graduate Fellowship from the Texas Center for Writers (now Michener Center). Through excellent timing, he was able to use the fellowship to stay home and be a house dad to his son Max, who was born in 1995.

W. Joe has been an active participant in Austin’s poetry/spoken word community and counts himself lucky to have been a student of Albert Huffstickler, Austin Poetry Legend. He has had one book of short stories, Harmon Place, published by Primal Press. His poems have appeared in Borderlands, Nerve Cowboy, Utter, DiVerseCities I and II, at the websites PoetryTonight and GumballPoetry and in the anthologies How To Be This Man and Stand Up Poetry. His poetry video “$5200 MSTA” has been shown at The Dallas Video Festival, San Antonio Underground Film Festival, Austin Film Festival, and VideoEx in Zurich, Switzerland.

Hairy Eyeball

More disturbing even than the spare hair around my ears
shadowing my broad tattooed back and
pined away from what used to be a kinghell widow’s peak
it’s this hairy eyeball I’m regarding things through these days

The one cartooned on mensroom walls
in every club in town
three four five namechanges ago
Cannibal Club Foot Electric Liberty Lounge

The one copped from behind the straw boss’s mirrored shades
from the substitute teacher trying to be tough
the P.O. not tolerating no mess
and my old girlfriend’s dad who I couldn’t take serious

How did it come to this?
riding herd hard on my own students who
come to class exhausted whose perspective I lose
looking down from my lectern with bad faith assumed

Or my wondrous son with his far focused mind
each day when he bursts from his third grade door
as often as not my words rein him back in
main concern to make sure he’s not forgot anything

This hairy eyeball does not sit well within my skull
and I am way too happy to share my irritation
mantle of authority wearing like a hair shirt
I’ll trash once the pilgrimage bus pulls away

Then don a holey Rat Fink T
first drawn the day after I was born
I love Rat Fink like an autistic twin
treasuring his image

Years of carrying his rubber likeness on a keychain
broke it down through totemry and hard use
These days my keys are wrangled
by a glass eyeball with a green iris

That dangles in the airconditioner vent of my old truck
rides in the pocket of my coat
thumbed like a lucky marble
lucid and blessedly hairless

Heading West

I-10 in West Texas

Three-bladed windmills
top flat hills
shrugging their shoulders
and nudging eachother
into a lackadaisical daisy dance

Triceratops and T-Rex
regal and bright
in the rest-stop mensroom’s
full wall mosaic
reward us for getting this far

New Mexico

Sleeplessness perches on the headboard
like a big-eyed rabbit skull
on the lookout for toothy thoughts

Sand in my shirt
rolling over a strange mattress
where space aliens lay down to earth
over fifty years ago

Morning and the sun shines brightly
cool air
offering no resistance

California Mojave Desert—Hwy 40

Spread my arms on out forever
while stones thorns and spikes
bid me watch my step

Even as my eyes are drawn
out and around my skull
in panorama

Ringed by mountains’ dark promise of shade
somehow the sun can’t touch me

Sunday Morning at the Cadillac Ranch

Going to the Cadillac Ranch
counts just the same as going
to church

This fact was revealed to me
by the way the sun shone down
on the chrome cross speaker support
embedded in the center
of the rear window shelf
in a ’58 Coupe de Ville

By the fact that every single radio
in every single dashboard
of every single Cadillac
was tuned to an AM Christian station

By the spray painted jesusfishes
and the unsullied solid gold
of the most beauteous ’54
a chariot swung low and slow
waiting to roll on into
that great by and by

Sun’s rays jacobsladder through the clouds
in perfect parallel with ten vintage Cadillacs
nosed down into the North Texas plain
buried in cement on which to build a church

As our prayers get sent up along
with hydrochloroflourocarbons
of a spray can not quite empty
hissing along with the windswept choir

The Prophet Hazel Motes said:
“Nobody with a good car
needs to be justified.”
No---

nor any of this neither.