Daniela Gioseffi contributed these rants (even a bio in rant form!) which I pass on entire. I love rants.



DANIELA GIOSEFFI pronounced Gee-o-SEF-ee has published too many books of real poetic social conscience to care about naming them. She wrote these poems especially forRealPoetik on commission to her tired tongue. She won the American Book Award from The Before Columbus Foundation for WOMEN ON WAR: International Voices for Survival in the Nuclear Age, (Simon & Schuster/TOUCHSTONE. 1990) and ON PREJUDICE: A Global Perspective, (Doubleday/ANCHOR, 1993)-- the world's FIRST multicultural text on issues of xenophobia, sexism and racism. Her latest books are WORD WOUNDS & WATER FLOWERS from VOICES IN ITALIAN AMERICANA press located at Purdue Univerisity and IN BED WITH THE EXOTIC ENEMY, stories & novella, Avisson Press, Greensboro NC,1997. Hers is the only Italian female name, besides Diane DiPrima's, to make it into the annals of American poetry as early as 1960's and 70's. Now there are more who have profited from her pioneering struggle. She began actual life as a belly dancing poet of the choreopoem in Soho in 1971, but was born in the Ironbound section of Newark in 1941. Did you know that the largest mass lynching in the USA took place in New Orleans in 1891 and was of a group of immigrant Italian laborers? Did you know that there were Concentration Camps for Italian Americans in the USA during World War II--just like those for Japanese Americans--mainly for the purpose of confiscating their properties-- while thousands of German POW's were allowed to walk free in American towns and fraternize with American women? There were no Japanese prisoners of war at all, here, during WWII, because they were all summarily killed upon capture--due to the xenophobia toward Asian's and the love of blond hair, rampant in USA and still afoot.

Daniela likes to teach RealHistory, but is a blond Italian contradicting all stereotypes, like the facts in the following poems. For doing so, she has been ostracized by the stuffy rightwing establishment and put aside by the silly funky, dis-establishment-- but is still loved by thousands of allies. Daniela is entirely an independent with her own websites at (WISE WOMEN"S WEB) and

THERE ARE "LOTS" OF POETS

Whole shopping mall asphalt parking lots
full of them
trying to seduce truth with carloads of words packed in plastic
shopping bags deeper than the bags under their cyberspace eyes,
but there are lots more
just baking in the sun eating pizza, licking icecream cones
under the disapparing ozone layer
getting cancers of the tongue
crapping out smart-assed laughter, hah hey,
while everything burps to an end
exhausted and glutted, pinched and puted,
farted out in shopping malls full of movies
of sexy gun malls
and gourmet foods
while their "Count-
ry Tits of Thee"
buys dictators allies--Papa Doc, Marcos, Mobutu, Hitlers who eat corpses
and screw Third World children to racks
for sale and sail them into smut movies to delectate white First World
decadents
who love to see
exploding guns, blood splatter, speeding cars, torn sex organs,
flesh-- a cheap rag
to be sold to farting CEO's
with multi-million dollar suck-up saleries
who vote for religious hypocrites. Right, right and
righter. Did you know that the word "salary"
comes from the word "Salt," as in "worth your salt"
from a time before money
when labor was paid in "salt" a valuable commodity to live by.

Oh, well. Forget it. Listen
to them all boogey down to loud hard, bad rock guitars
strummed like flying penises headed for the stars.
Listen to them thrum thrum thrum with faces all squenced seriously
to hell as if bad music were important in the Ninth Circle of Hell--
as if they were ringing
the doom's day bell,
Look at them dance their heads right off
so that they float among the dead stars
in the Ninth Circle of Dante's Hell the word is
"Oh well, oh well, oh well!"

________________________________________
WHERE HAVE ALL THE FLOWERS GONE?

They've been poisoned everyone by
PCB's
Hollywood tits
Plutonium
Larry Flint
Strontium 90
Weed Killer
Paint Thinner
Carbon Florides
Coca Cola
Sacarine and aspertame
BGH & BST hormones
Cocain & crack, steroids. Cliche, you say?
Greed and Neo-Goth Grung
Smart-ass poets, funky religion
occult bullshit, fake torn genes,
and pie in the sky
pill in the gill
juice in the O.J. blitz,
sports opiate, baseball scores of the World Serious,
fiddlling away while Rome burns
like an overbaked pizza of roadkill
on the sidewalks of New York, Tokyo, Paris and
London, where the Queen pretends she never smelled a fart
in her funky style, handbag all a twindle with treacle, noise high
while her kids sex their brains out
wasting fortunes "and the people,
ah, the people,
they that dwell up in the steeple"
wait to be beheaded by her silver teapot,
by a lack of air
and water
that is drinkable.
Yes, Global warming is here
with skin cancer everywhere
and some poets drowned out by Hollywood and MTV feel
smart jokes are all
there's time to reel out and tell this fall
when everything, everything
falls with the bright leaves
through a dark hole in space
where its sucked in to die.
The role call will find everything
six feet under the rising sea
said the bee to the Honeysuckle
as he buzzed his last high
and shouted "UP YOURS!"
to the hot heating sky.
When will we ever learn
when will be ev-ever learn
learn when will we ever
ever we ever ever
ever ever learn when will we
flowers gone, where have all the young girls, young boys gone
in uniform everyone, when will we shall overcome...
_________________________________

My WONDER BRA

is the only tool left to an aging feminist
who saw it all come and go and go and come
before
the door shut
on entropy
and left everything festering
in a bowl, a hole
in the ozone of climatology
and so the immigrant generation of the American Dream
now has given up cream
for high cholesterol
and counts, LDL's and HDL's and Heart Attack Ratios
and the American flag keeps adding stripes
to its belt, as the young cynics sigh,
at the cocksure macho punk
of the world market.
Ah so, you like Pesto Sauce
and food boutiques on the Upper Eastside
full of salmonella salad bars?
Yes?
And up here in Harlem the water ain't drinkable
and the cancer rate is high
and its the same old story
so turn on the afternoon T.V. and get your thrills
from incest and inter-domestic robbery.
The seniors with nothing to do are paid to take bus rides to Atlantic City
to pull one armed bandits, losing quarters all day,
while lots of carrots remain unplanted
and trees need help being seeded.
We need more trees and less Gambling Cacinos shouted the naive politico
before they blindfolded and shot him
for running for president. They did first offer him a Dominos Pizza
delivered so fast
it ran over three people. But the speed limit had been uppitied so
the violent porn industry could be delivered faster, three times as big as
Hollywood
which is so sensational with sex and explosions and intrigue and fun and comedy
that the CEO's had no place to go farther out
but to shop at Larry Flint's
for little Black children in South Africa and Brazil especially murdered
for sex movies
and what the hell!
I was raped by the KKK at the virginal age of twenty
in 1961 for Civil Rights, riding the wrong end of a bus, sitting at lunch
counters in Selma,
but truth is stranger than fiction. Mustard up your nose!
The Wonder Bra is really into cleavage bigger than ever
deep crivices, long after breast feeding has come back
and the "ba ba" been discarded,
and MM was murdered or committed suicide
for being worshipped for only her tits
which were mammary glands for nursing the babies
she always wanted but couldn't have
because of her silicon problems.
Have you got them?
Use soy gel instead say the health food nuts
and maybe the crazy are as sane as ever
to want nothing to do
with the big sick world of tits and dollars
and music that hollers
nothing's
a fun
thing.









WATCHING AMERICAN TELEVISION--July, 1986

Preview of a murder mystery: the slender ankle
of a woman's corpse
about to be cut by a screaming
chain saw. A man
stands at a window in a bloody white
butcher's coat, puking with a chain saw in hand
"Bear with me, " he says, "We're almost through!"
A woman finds something bloody in the trash and screams.
People are suddenly dancing and eating MacMuffins
and smile with big burgers to lips
singing:"It's a good time
for the good taste of MacDonalds."
The taste of blood sickens my tongue.

I dream of rain forests destroyed for grazing cattle
and Chicago stockyards where millions of steer a year
get bashed senseless with sledges before their throats are cut,
carcasses strung to drip. This horror show
is real as the rape of pregnant women
by Contra's called Freedom Fighters
on television--bellies sliced by bayonets
are not shown here amidst commercial
music so that fetuses bled from murdered wombs live
in the imagination instead.

A talk show host discusses sodomy laws in Georgia.
A handsome homosexual, looking pale, thin,
and sickly tells how he was arrested
in his bedroom during an act of sodomy
with a government official who got off free.
An elderly woman says: "This is a matter of human rights,
not just gay rights, I don't want the government in my bedroom."
The talk show host claims: "Americans are not quite ready
for the brownshirts in their bedrooms." While skin heads
shout Neo-nazi slogans
in Spokane, a newscaster interrupts
for a speacial flash.
The Pope has welcomed Waldheim to the Vatican
and protests rage all over Italy.
I remember that Hitler passed anti-sodomy
laws, was rumored to have only one testicle
and been a coprophiliac--but I like men and women together
--turning love into wanted children.
A muscular man in a black leather jacket rides
a Honda motorbike with a salivating grin
and a punk-rock teeny bopper with blond hair
sticking up like a chicken tipped green and purple
says how she loves her bike, too. The Honda logo floods
the screen with hardcore music
and the motorcycle roars
into the distance of a mountain road
far off in an instant.

A housewife beams over her white sheets
and the white shirt her small boy dirtied with mud
is clean again from "Blue Cheer."
The news shows the burned body of a tortured Chilean boy
and a Pinochet torture ship named, Esmerelda, sails
into New York harbor, masts alight with white Christmas lights
for the president's Liberty Day celebration and ship parade
with the nuclear gunboat, USS Iowa, just back
from the coast of Central America.
So that the actor become president, Ronald Reagan, can push
a Star Wars button and laser beam The Statue of Liberty
as Rockefeller Center's Rockettes kick
their heels up to the strains of The Star Spangled Banner
and the screen floods with fireworks
like the sound of seven tons of bombs a day
falling on El Salvador,
raining blood. South Korean students riot
in the streets for democracy
and New York City sounds like thousands of bombs
going off while the Salt II Treaty
is violated and sodomy is outlawed in Georgia
and the AIDS Hotline flashes a number
and a voice asks: "Do you know where your children are?"
The war on drugs claims more civilian victims in the Bronx
as clouds of toilet paper hold a dialog about
who's softer and float with Disneyland faces
over the rooftops of a blue and whirling world....



Daniela Gioseffi


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