Issue 33: Ivan Pozzoni

The Ballad of Peggy and Pedro

The ballad of Peggy and Pedro barked out by the punkbestials

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,

among the drop-outs of the Rome open city,

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.

The Anti-Promise to Love

Anti-poet, victim of my anti-poetry, 

all I could do is dedicate to you an anti-promise 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 techno-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.

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 2018, 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, Here the Austrians are more severe than the Bourbons, Cherchez the troika. et The Invective Disease with Limina Mentis,Lame da rasoi, with Joker, Il Guastatore, with Cleup, Patroclo non deve morire, with deComporre. He wrote 150 volumes, wrote 1000 essays, founded an avant-garde movement (NéoN-avant-gardisme), and wrote an Anti-manifesto NéoN-Avant-gardiste. His verses are translated into 93 languages. In 2024, after 6 years of total retrait of academic studies, he return and melts the NSEAE Kolektivne (New socio/ethno/aesthetic anthropology).

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