poems by Ivan Pozzoni

If the verses do not protest

 

If the verses don’t protest about the nature of Italy’s excise

taxes on taxes, against nature, we will end up like Britain’s Brexit

with petrol skyrocketing we’ll have to dinghy our way out of the EU

and, alas!, we shall be forced indeed, to invade Tripolitania again.

 

If the verses do not protest about the nature of amnesties

ante I build illegally and post I get a seven-storey villa,

as if Snow White ate the apple and, when dead, met the seven dwarfs,

we’ll rate a hundred days in sheep’s clothing better than one day as lions.

 

If the verses do not protest about the nature of the referenda abrogandi

with lower turnout than All Saints’ Day,

– every referendum was repealed by the intervention of the two chambers of swindlers-

we will have to plead for the Swiss import of a referendum abrogating 945 crooks.

 

If the verses do not protest about the nature at the parking Italy of millions of non-EU citizens

we will find ourselves, in ten years’ time, with an increase of 60,000,000 American citizens,

and, in Milan, Florence, and Rome, with 200,000,000 Asian and African refugees,

the American President will be a lawyer from Matera and the Pope a Bedouin from the Kalahari.

 

If the verses do not protest about the nature of the waters of the seas of Taranto and Crotone

torn by the carcinogenic fumes of hyper-capitalism,

we will hold a big party, open to all, at the hospital,

inviting 80% of the inhabitants of our poisoned Southern Italy.

 

If the verses do not protest about the nature of Belen’s ass,

media interest with skyrocketing audience and consequent auditel meltdown,

the increase in desire will have a yen-like contraction,

and we’ll be forced to yell ‘we were assholes’ at 10,000 decibels.

 

If the verses don’t protest, I feel like a Titanic in a titanic struggle,

bitten by a Bic pen without a tetanus shot,

rusting at the tip, the tip of the iceberg,

dry of ink like an Erg distributor.

 

 

 

When the muse sulks

 

Room F of the Writing Museum presents the scene of Mount Calvary

with contemporary octogenarian writers who insist on rhyming in septenary,

banging on the metre, measuring the arms of the cross,

have broken the legs and arms of the phantom generation that tries to extend its chest

in grasping a gulp of air, they have choked it with debt and rhyme,

interested in organising magazines and directing previews.

 

Room L of the writing museum is dedicated to the ‘clerks’ and ‘housewives’

who dip their Bic pens into the toilet bowl using them as cleavers,

lyrical democracy is fine, not lyricism for a thousand lira

of predictable compositions built on the emoticon trinomial heart – sun – amire,

illiterates, backwards and forwards, who, by trade, teach snowboarding,

without ever having been able to learn how to use the word corrector.

 

Room U of the writing museum portrays a savannah scenario

where novice Dante train for market competition dressed as a hooker,

selling and buying verses by the kilo as if they were on the Milan stock exchange

without realising that the writer by trade is a man used to juggling his anus,

difficult the concept to make culture survive be our highest mission

if every useless freelancer thinks one of his shitty articles is worth The Million.

 

Room O of the writing museum is reproduced as a blogger’s room

with big cockroaches at the keyboard holding their fogger at each other’s throats,

experts in nothing, they have their say on everything, lovers of scattering,

protected by the anonymity of a site they engage in English, dissing, pissing, trolling and fist-fucking,

who knows what kind of shenanigans they’ll get with Brexit,

they’ll have to abandon English and go back to gossiping days.

 

Room X of the writing museum is dedicated to me, infamous Orpheus,

circus buffoon intent on snatching morons from the arms of Morpheus,

me who doesn’t exist, me who doesn’t exist, I.v.a.n. project,

Injurious – Virus – Anonymous – Neon-avantgarde artist with no budget,

committed to plugging the leaks of rampant bohemian consumerism,

with Plasil and Dissenten verse tablets.

 

 

 

The great poets

 

The last two years of my life, with extreme boredom,

have been filled with the knowledge of great ‘poets’,

not one of whom, strange as it may seem, boasts of having been born in a manger:

they all deserve a cover, white, of Einaudi, with the arrogance of being high priests.

 

Hundreds of inconclusive amateurs, far from any form of humility, with the motto of ‘je rode’

kill anodyne verses, with the poison of ink, as if they were King Herod,

all excellent, refractory to all criticism, martyred on the Mount of Olives,

they do not conceive that our only salvation is to put two condoms on their hands,

and, anti-conceptionally, to spare us all the wrong

of witnessing an abortion every time.

 

I discover that, according to Goethe, ‘irony is the sentiment that breaks free from detachment’:

irony, eirôneía, the mother of dystopia and dissimulation, remains the lance of Don Quixote,

lance in rest against the windmills, advent of the expectation of checkmate

against those who churn out Tarentine verses so dull that they condemn us to garrottes,

reveals to the ox citizen how a desperate bankrupt

came to murder a magistrate and not a whore,

shows the man in the street how verses without neustic

are able to release the chronic evil of a constipated world.

 

I discover that I am at the mercy of three-dimensional image writing

that will force all readers to change the (three) lenses of their glasses to 3D,

signal to me, correctly, a former warehouse worker in a blazer

that in three hundred years Tranströmer’s Sweden will win the World Cup,

that we are simultaneously experiencing a dozen Copernican revolutions

without realising that a millennium before Tranströmer came Alcmane.

poems by Ivan Pozzoni

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