Poems of Ivan Pozzoni (Italy)

Ivan Pozzoni was born in Monza in 1976. He introduced Law and Literature in Italy and the publication of essays on Italian philosophers and on the ethics and juridical theory of the ancient world; He collaborated with several Italian and international magazines. Between 2007 and 2024, different versions of the books were published: Underground and Riserva Indiana, with A&B Editrice, Versi Introversi, Mostri, Galata morente, Carmina non dant damen, Scarti di magazzino, Qui gli austriaci sono più severi dei Borboni, Cherchez la troika e La malattia invettiva con Limina Mentis, Lame da rasoi, with Joker, Il Guastatore, with Cleup, Patroclo non deve morire, with deComporre Edizioni and Kolektivne NSEAE with Divinafollia. He was the founder and director of the literary magazine Il Guastatore – «neon»-avant-garde notebooks; he was the founder and director of the literary magazine L'Arrivista; he is the editor and chef of the international philosophical magazine Información Filosófica. It contains a fortnight of autogérées socialistes edition houses. He wrote 150 volumes, wrote 1000 essays, founded an avant-garde movement (NéoN-avant-gardisme, approved by Zygmunt Bauman), and wrote an Anti-manifesto NéoN-Avant-gardiste. This is mentioned in the main university manuals of literature history, philosophical history and in the main volumes of literary criticism. His book La malattia invettiva wins Raduga, mention of the critique of Montano et Strega. He is included in the Atlas of contemporary Italian poets of the University of Bologne and is included several times in the major international literature magazine, Gradiva. His verses are translated into 25 languages. In 2024, after six years of total retrait of academic studies, he return to the Italian artistic world and melts the NSEAE Kolektivne (New socio/ethno/aesthetic anthropology)

I visualised the boxes hidden in your USB drive,

Having asked me to go and get them for you

Anxiously looking for a permanent contract,

Aware of fighting lost battles like the tenth MAS Flotilla.

What there was of your thirty yearslost in the corridors of a warehouse,

The enveloped bonuses, the career, with the desire not to end up broke

In the Flavio amphitheatre of web-hoppers with mouths like urinals,

Ending up on the walls of Domus Tiberiana like Ianuarius.

To find out who you are not, you have to noscere te ipsum on a digital medium

It's not enough, as in Grimm, to consult the mirror of your desires:

Turning each voice of death into paper,

That he lefts no will,

Forgetting to look after

What everyone defines as the normal business

Of every human being: office, home, family,

The ideal, at last, of a regular life.

 

Abandoned, back in 2026, any defense

Of a permanent contract,

Labelled as unbalanced,

I'm locked up in the centre of Milan,

Hotel Acapulco, a decrepit hotel,

Calling upon the dreams of the marginalized,

Exhausting a lifetime's savings

In magazines and meagre meals.

 

When the Carabinieri burst

Into the decrepit room of the Hotel Acapulco

And find yet another dead man without a will,

Who will tell the ordinary story

Of an old man who lived windbreak?

Of the Garibaldi Bridge, with a mixture of hatred and despair,

Teaches us the intimate relationship between geometry and love,

To love as if we were maths surrounded by stray dogs.

 

Peggy you were drunk, normal mood,

In the slums along the bed of the Tiber

And alcohol, on August evenings, doesn't warm you up,

Clouding every sense in annihilating dreams,

Transforming every chewed-up sentence into a gunfight in the back

On armour dissolved by the summer heat.

Lying on the edges of the bridge's ledges,

You opened your heart to the gratuitous insult of Pedro,

Your lover, and toppled over, falling into the void,

Drawing gravitational trajectories from the sky to the cement.

 

Pedro wasn't drunk, a day's journey away,

You weren't drunk, abnormal state of mind,

In the slums along the bed of the Tiber,

Or in the empty parties of Milan's movida,

With the intention of explaining to dogs and tramps

A curious lesson of non-Euclidean geometry.

Mounted on the edge of the bridge,

In the apathetic indifference of your distracted pupils,

You jumped, in the same trajectory of love,

Along the same fatal path as your Peggy,

Landing on the cement at the same instant.

 

The punkbestials of the Garibaldi Bridge, cleared by the local authority,

Will spread a surreal lesson to every slum in the world

Centred on the astonishing idea

That love is a matter of non-Euclidean geometry.

All I could do is dedicate to you an antpromise of love,

My anti-promise of love would have the features of a synesthesia,

The Stalinist hardness of steel and the softness of colour,

The finesse of friendship and the consistency of love,

Your white eyes turn me into a hydrophobic cynic,

And there's no doctor for rage, my love.

 

An anti-promise of love to be read before a registrar,

As to convince a tecno-trivial world,

I've loved you since June 1976, perhaps, in truth, since April,

I was an embryo and you were still immersed in the aurora borealis,

For six years you would have been an angel, a ghost, the inessential of a fractal,

Without batting an eyelid waiting for you, six years, thirty-six years, with nothing to say,

The sheep of Panurge's contemporaries would condemn me to total silence.

 

You are my anti-promise of love, and the idea may seem imperceptible to you,

I observe you sleeping, serene, like a crumb abandoned in a toaster,

My  love I am stripped of the role of ‘sapper’ - it is abyssal like a submarine,

Condemned to scatter torpedoes under the (false) guise of a dogfish.

With the sound of my keyboard

How Baasima died of leprosy

Without ever reaching the border,

Or how the Armenian Meroujan

Under a flutter of half-moons

Felt the air in his eyes vanish

Thrown into a mass grave;

Charlee, who moved to Brisbane

In search of a better world,

Ends the journey

In the mouth of an alligator,

Or Aurelio, named Bruna

Who, after eight months in hospital

Died of AIDS contracted

To hit a ring road.

 

Nobody will remember Yehoudith,

Her lips carmine red,

Erased by drinking toxic poisons

In an extermination camp,

Or Eerikki, with his red beard, 

Defeated by the turbulence of the waves,

Who sleeps, scoured by orcas,

On the bottom of some sea;

The head of Sandrine, Duchess

Of Burgundy heard the rumour of the feast

As it fell from the blade of a guillotine

Into a basket

And Daisuke, modern samurai,

Counted the revolutions of a plane's engine 

Transhumanizing a kamikaze gesture into harakiri.

 

I could go on and on

In the stifling heat of a summer night

How Iris and Anthia, deformed Spartan children

Were abandoned,

Or how Deendayal died of deprivation

Attributable to the single crime

Of living the life of an outcast

Without ever having rebelled;

Ituha, an Indian girl,

Threatened with a knife,

Who ends up dancing with Manitou

In the anteroom of a brothel

And Luther, born in Lancashire

Freed from the profession of beggar

And forced to die by His Britannic Majesty

In the coal mines.

 

Who will remember Itzayana

And her family massacred

In a village on the outskirts of Mexico

By Carranza's retreating army,

And what of Idris, the African rebel,

Stunned by shocks and burns

While untamed by colonial domination,

He tried to steal an ammunition truck;

Shahdi flew high into the sky

Above the flagpoles of the Green Revolution,

Landing in Tehran with his wings torn apart

By a cannon shot,

And Tikhomir, a Chechen bricklayer,

That fell among the indifferent faces

To the ground from the roof of Lenin's Mausoleum,

Without comment.

 

From objects of narrative

Fractured into fragments of non-existence

Transmits distant sounds

Of resistance.

I give out elbows like Greg ‘The Hammer’ Valentine,

If I don't apply myself I'll never be able to aspire to the Nobel Prize

Irreducible deutoplasma among Hegel's black cows.

 

I don't fit in, i have a schizophrenic delusion

I hate the people and dip my pen in arsenic,

I sing, outside the choir, like an X Factor mythomaniac

Defusing bombs and dealing with a metal detector.

 

I don't fit in, i've got a killer's disposition,

I wander between the zombies, style King of Pop in Thriller,

Flying at low altitude I quote quotes of quotients,

Forced to pack subtitles for non-users.

 

I don't fit in, i have all sorts of phobias,

In the queue i crave the green, like a virtuous dendrophile,

Setting the world on fire, blurring time with the zoom,

I surrender myself to the obsolescence of consecutio temporum.

 

Taxonomy characterises homo sapiens by the shape of the hand,

It does not distinguish the hominid of the Bible, the hominid of the Gospel, the hominid of the Koran;

Modern anatomy has made a discovery worthy of belief:

The average Italian has a taxable thumb.

 

The exorbitant increase in rates does not mean the disappearance of taxes,

No animal sexologist has ever managed to break the deadlock,

If rates are lowered or increased, taxes will increase,

They will be nymphomaniac rates, far from a desire to lower them.

 

Italy is a republic founded on taxes, from north to south,

For many who would like to put things right, it would take a government Robin Hood,

The average Italian is in ADE every day to measure the tax burden,

When the figure reaches 50%, we'll call in the pathologist to certify the cerebral embolism.

 

Itaglia, the land of inventors, imposes a tax on the shade of shop awnings,

The maximum of the tax wedge (taking the ass) is the municipal tax on nuclear power plants,,

That, in your bill, you find an EF-EN tax on the efficiency (?) of electricity,

How the fuck do they manage to convince you of the inconsistency is funny.

 

 

There's the TV tax, there's the tax on tax, unconstitutional discontent,

And we discover that our rubbish, subject to VAT, has added value,

The death tax, aimed at the death certificate,

Guys, tell me, if there had been in the times of Yeshua, Lazarus, how they would have put it.

 

 

Fuck, the dead must resurrect and pay 35 € queuing at the Post Office,

The tax on inventions does not apply to the invention of new taxes,

And they accuse you of defamation if you claim to be governed by a bunch of cuckolds.

 

The tax on spirits, in the alcoholic sense, the tax on aircraft noise,

Aircraft noise? We're thinking of the tax on the mess of an Inti-Illimani concert,

There's a tax on staircases, council tax on dogs, tax on telephone boxes.

Fuck off, maybe we were better off with the Bourbon tax extravaganzas.

The freedom of the ignorant reigns supreme,

And we find ourselves stuck in the network like mussels in the current of the lamparo.

 

Every holy day we plunge into the mud of the World Wide Web,

Disorientated like intimidated nomadic tourists looking for a Club Med,

Tough and carefree like members of a neo-avant-garde,

Embarked, real roughnecks, in the cabins of the Costa Concordia,

Carefree enough to sail that everything ends up in front of a machete,

In the sado-masochistic jungle of webmasters, you always come across a webheber,

Ready to gag you in a connection/disconnection relationship,

by convincing you, with ease, that you yourself are circumcision material.

 

My silly worms, where will they ever go

If any ball ends up in the net without the possibility of verifying,

No opportunity to criticise, if they fall on you in herds like neo-fascists ,

Bundles in layettes with a baby bottle in their mouths as insatiable alcoholics,

All reasoning falls before the webbeast,

The web aristocracy centres on the De Sade brand,

‘abandon all hope’ you who enter here, in blog

If you're wrong enough not to share tastes with Baron Sacher-Masoch's.

 

In truth browsing has become a drama,

Without having to connect the USB of your PC to the wires of an electroencephalogram:

Who hasn't guessed that the www has become an outlet,

is condemned to observe the net like Boris Beckett.

 

You know, I'll make you immortal in “portrait d'anonyme”.

My ink cuts better than a bowl of hemlock:

without anyone knowing your fame has evolved.

 

would rival Géricault in his Raft of the Medusa.

 

Italian art has become an assault on the pot,

More fulfilled in the ‘brothel’ than the members of a porn film,

So in the Poetryweb the actor is confused with a stallion

Full of anachronistic texts fit for the cover of Le Ore.

 

Lyrical democracy must not be a two-bit lyric,

It is essential to study and it is not forbidden to go deeper,

All of them now strictly improvising, equipped with a notepad,

As if they should sign up for Tú sí que vales rather than culture.

 

To write on the www we should set up an entry test,

It's forbidden to touch the keyboard on pain of sudden death,

Not suitable for late modern art, Lucini teaches, his revolver at his head,

the incurable disease of the turn of the century is called Adsl.

 

The shadow of the wave reflected in my right retina,

Hands clenched to grasp Mediterranean sands

Worn under red surfing bermudas.

Corpse n.7,

Muffled screaming attempts at the pit of my stomach

Marrakech hash maps in my pockets,

Scanty dirhams sown between my purse and trousers,

Led me to the mouth of the abyss.

Corpse No. 12,

‘Eloi, Eloi, lemà sabactàni’,

I don't remember who was shouting it to whom

Not being written in the Koran:

I too died invoking it in vain.

Corpse No. 18,

Retreating on the roads between the dunes of Misrata,

In thirsty slalom between friendly and enemy missiles,

And dying of water.

Corpse No 20,

Although nomads, like me, sway

On desert ships, detonated fluids,

Never will they get used to drowning.

Every grave of the unknown migrant

Whispers that it is hard to embrace

A death that comes from the sea.