Daniela Gioseffi

Daniela Gioseffi's latest book of poems, GOING ON will be publisheed by VIA

Folios, at Purdue University in 2000. Word Wounds & Water Flowers published

by VIA at Purdue University, 1995, and her latest book of fiction is In Bed

with the Exotic Enemy: Stories & Novella (Avisson Books, Greensboro, North

Carolina, 1997). She edits WISE WOMEN'S WEB <www.garden.net/users/wisewomensweb>

and is president of Skylands Writers & Artists Association <www.garden.net/users/swaa>.

What I want for Xmas: A Holiday Rant

Two things I've already got made me giggle

and give a Saint Nick belly laugh to a slobbering sizzle

when Gingrich with his "Contract with America," put Newt's

resignation from Congress in our 1998 Xmas sock

and crawled back under his dirty rock!

as Al D'Amato got put out of the Senate on his ass! What a lovely

glittering package of Xmas cache!

Now,

if only Clinton doesn't bomb Iraq's starving children,

women, old men and many a suffering civilian--

to plow

away the memory of Monica and blitz away his impeachment!

To make us forget that The World Trade Org.

rules the globe with unfair labor

and sweat shops,

environmental messes and profit piggery,

and we all instead remember the glory

of the Battle

of Seattle!

as sugar plums dance in our tear-gassed heads

and teeth broken by rubber bullets smile like Xmas Jack-O-Lanterns

making finally forget Whitehouse interns.

World trade needs be governed by a democracy

with elected reps. of working people, internationally

enforced laws.

And, if George Bush, Jr., known as "Shrub," keeps his paws

off the presidency, his only claim to fame frying more prisoners

on death row in Texas than all the other governors,

and if only the bloodshed by U.S. M-16s stops in Indonesia

and East Timor where we should have sent

rice and beans instead of weapons to death squads to be spent,

if Shell Inc., pays up for the deaths it dealt Africans,

stealing their oil rich lands, poisoning and murdering them,

if "my country, tis of thee.."

stops supporting dictators in South Korea,

if the CIA's multi-billion dollar budget shrinks

into oblivion and multi-national nuclear and oil barons,

Bechtel, AT&T, Grumman, Hughes, Exxon and GE,

who run the US military

budget still up over 400 billion yearly,

would disappear, or be used properly

to clean up the strontium 90, PCB's and plutonium leaks

all over Hanford, Washington

and everywhere, into our ground waters so that one

out of four of us

dies of cancers

caused by Pentagon pollutants,

and if the "language school" of poetry would finally shut up

its dull merde-mouth, an old-hat experiment in nonsense

that's been going on since

I was a kid! Before Alice went to Wonderland

Through the Looking Glass! If that "John Dingleberry School"

along with the "language poets" would disappear into thin cold winter air

outshined by Rudolph's nose

proving the Emperor, James Tate, and Empress, Jorie Graham, have no clothes

forever, taking their solipsistic nihilism with them--

I'd be happy to continue celebrating toward the millennium.

As it is, an awful lot of bull crap makes it into print

making fascists--who don't want human poetry to be read--

happy as the din of nothingness full of Sophomoric silly

Existential nausea, boring "language school" poetry

drowns out all meaning, human feelings, and kills empathy

reminding me

every age has its crappy,

celebrated writers who will be forgotten mightily!

Our most renown American poets--

Dickinson and Whitman--had to publish themselves

or stay unpublished as Ginsberg

was before Ferlinghetti gave him his start!

Kulture with a capital K often is no more than a fart

for art's sake effort.

So light up the lights of the city, fart and bless us!

Serve spaghetti to the starving and long live little presses

--City Lights, RealPoetik, and such, and other bright ones all!

Happy holidays

are here again, oh, cuss us!--

to make most of us miserable in a Xmas rush.

And bless the millions of poor have-nots

as last year's forgotten fruitcake rots!

Daniela Gioseffi