The Corporate Christmas Carol

By

God rest ye merry businessmen,
Start markups on your trash!
Remember that this holiday
Is when you rake in cash!
It saves you from those creditors
You owe from that last crash…

Oh, tidings of bottom-lines grown fat, ever so fat!
Oh, tidings of bottom-lines grown fat!

From commerce wonks in Washington
There comes this press release:
“Just keep the boobs in spending-mode
So cash flow doesn’t cease!
A Christmas without splurging means
That profits won’t increase…”

Oh, tidings of credit lines gone wild, ever so wild!
Oh, tidings of credit lines gone wild!

The euro’s going down the tubes;
The E.U. too, en masse—
We owe some fifteen trillion bucks
That we don’t have, alas!
If China calls our paper debt,
We might as well take gas…

Oh, tidings of bankruptcy and loss, ever such loss!
Oh, tidings of bankruptcy and loss!

That’s why we need this frenzied rush
Of buying gone berserk!
At Christmas you must drum into
The head of every jerk
That he should spend and spend and spend
To keep us all in work…

Oh, tidings of avarice unrestrained, unrestrained!
Oh, tidings of avarice unrestrained!




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Joseph S. Salemi has published poems, translations, and scholarly articles in over one hundred journals throughout the United States, Canada, and Great Britain. His four collections of poetry are Formal Complaints and Nonsense Couplets, issued by Somers Rocks Press, Masquerade from Pivot Press, and The Lilacs on Good Friday from The New Formalist Press. He has translated poems from a wide range of Greek and Roman authors, including Catullus, Martial, Juvenal, Horace, Propertius, Ausonius, Theognis, and Philodemus. In addition, he has published extensive translations, with scholarly commentary and annotations, from Renaissance texts such as the Faunus poems of Pietro Bembo, The Facetiae of Poggio Bracciolini, and the Latin verse of Castiglione. He is a recipient of a Herbert Musurillo Scholarship, a Lane Cooper Fellowship, an N.E.H. Fellowship, and the 1993 Classical and Modern Literature Award. He is also a four-time finalist for the Howard Nemerov Prize.