Forgive him all, on this endless road to Golgotha

Carrying, year after year, the same cross…

Ivan Pozzoni, a poet from Italy, shares his poetry

Ivan Pozzoni was born in Monza city of Italy 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. He was the founder and director of some literary magazines. He is included in the Atlas of contemporary Italian poets of the University of Bologne and figures in the great international literature review of Gradiva. His verses are translated into French, English and Spanish. In 2024, after six years of total retreat of academic studies, he returned to the Italian artistic world and melts the NSEAE Kolektivne (New socio/ethno/aesthetic anthropology).

THE BALLAD OF THE CROSS

Forgive him all, on this endless road to Golgotha

Carrying, year after year, the same cross,

Falling, getting up and falling, execrating his name adespota,

Unable to understand the sounds of your voice,

Sets out, finished, towards the summit of the ecumene

Without the comfort of the shoulders of a Simon of Cyrene.

 

There are those who think themselves a disappointment, like Mary Magdalene

And doesn’t get it, to be a collateral victim

Of the collapse of a man walking on the sidelines,

She feels inadequate, with her eyes to drown in,

And her mouth, helpless, her needs for Caetanus’ embraces

With him on top of a cross singing ‘Eloì, Eloì, lama sabactàni?’.

 

The scene is the twisted inlay of a thousand carpenters

Made of splinters, shreds, fragments, all to be assembled,

For, at times, his verses have the scant consistency of sewage,

Fluid in a liquid world, in water there is no wine to water down,

There is man, and his cross, far from the serenity of the cloister

With the centurion rubbing ink sponges into his face.

 

They shout at him, vox populi, that he is tired, that he must rest,

His only anguish is to build himself a new cross to load

On his curved back, he has stopped succeeding, Abba

Dreaming that hanging from the sky they have to put Barabbas.

***

THE POET’S CRAFT

I discovered why many people don’t like my poems

It is difficult for me to talk about life, and other fantasies,

I’m interested in politics, the social, the commune,

And – as Checco Zalone would say – these are things that nobody cares about.

 

On my tombstone i will write ‘[…] he was born to write verses […]’.

So I can be sure they will all be lost.

And I’ll put there a glass of Amaro Montenegro,

So, lost yes, but i don’t care.

***

THE UNCARING EPIGRAMMIST

To entertain you, reader lounging on the sofa,

i must ceaselessly invent shaman rhymes,

Heart-sun-sea assonances are not enough for the fierce epigrammist,

You wish to twist my brain with rhymes like gong / sarong or bordeaux / trumeaux,

But, believing you put your thirteen neurons in a strongbox,

You receive, unexpectedly, in return, a radiant ‘vaccagare’.

***

COOPÉRATION INTERNATIONALE

International cooperation was done by the yellow/green Interior Minister,

The French fleet disperses the boats of immigrants from Africa destined for Marseille,

Diverting them towards Lampedusa, and, in a burst of friendship, Salvini, without cannonballing

The X-MAS of EU comrades who do not accept non-EU citizens, merely kept them waiting.

 

The Mafia Council of the EU, Germany, Holland, Luxembourg and the US,

Thundered: ‘France has accepted 15 non-EU citizens, the remaining 3,000,000 in Lampedusa’,

And the Sicilian Papal State has created a concentration camp, amid the screams of the NGOs

We EU B-series wretches raise our hands, Australia machine-guns the boat people of Hong Kong.

 

Unfortunately, it is the absurd moment of international friendship,

Fake Albanian or American cultural mediators with a third grade education are depopulating,

Who force us vīkingr of militant art to hide the battle axe,

Without realising, that i hide the axe behind my back, and, at the right moment, it cuts.

 

The true intellectual has a duty to be politically incorrect, like coffee without grappa

Must shout that 3,000,000 irregular non-EU citizens in Italy is a number that handicaps

The autistic mechanisms of our State, abandoning the migrant to the commission of every whim,

I don’t understand the cult of hospitality, if the immigrant wants France and they block him in Nice,

They put him, having crossed the border, in Gendarmerie trucks and take him back to Ventimiglia,

On our national territory, if i were the of the Interior Minister i’d have declared a guerrilla status.

 

There is no escape from the sociological situation, you idiot artist who writes about love and hugs,

It’s hard for an anarchist to agree with the American walls with the Mexicans, and with the chains,

The Hungarian nazi fences, the wretched concentration camps in the two Libyas,

We keep all of Africa at home, giving subsidies and condemning citizens to the starvations

Of the absence of a citizen’s income, Di Maio has melted in the sun, we have Conte

More than billion-dollar engineering projects, free all of Africa in Sicily and i tear down the bridge.

***

BEYOND THE BRILLO BOX

My research on the form of writing rises above the Brillo Box,

I throw my verses in the strongbox as if they were in Fort Knox,

Start-up, repetition, reproduction give a life sentence to the originality

Of the centenarian editors of magazines now forgetful of all abrasiveness,

After all, you know, dentures should not be solicited by intelligent concepts,

By dint of accepting canine verses carmina dant panem only to their teeth,

If we, forty year-old teenagers, have to do Professor Birkermaier’s diet

For them, octogenarian children, it would be time to diagnose a shred of Alzheimer’s.

 

The current fashion of the granted critic is to bark against the successes of minimalism

Milanese or Roman, inn istèss, and we, 1970s ghosts, in search of the coveted minimum space,

Because to change the world we could useful the energetic vigour of maximalism,

Reading verses in rollian endecasyllables, in 2016, one feels like the victim of an odyssey in agony,

And the punishment of our no-future generations is to make the avant-garde in their forties

Intent on claiming a Lebensraum that does not end in Anschluss,

We Heermann condemned by flexibility to never blossom into arimanni,

Find ourselves re-knotting catheters to old specialists in trobar clus .

 

What do we have to do in order to achieve our fifteen seconds of fame

Show our asses on Barbara D’Urso, edit the cultural columns of L’Unità

Or patent rhymes that you mere mortals wouldn’t even dare to imagine

Barking dog does not sleep and asleep – as you would like us – does not help us bite,

Is woken by the caresses of an emir the late-modern Sleeping Beauty by cocaine

Available to suck US gal of black gold like a petrol pump,

Ladies, transgenders and gentlemen annuntio vobis gaudium magnum the fairytale is over

The generations beyond the Brillo Box will have to nibble leftovers food under the laden table.

_______________ 

Read: The Barbarian and the Princess