HOTEL ACAPULCO

 

Ivan Pozzoni

 

My emaciated hands continued to write,

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?

 

 

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 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.

 

 

 

EPIMILLIGRAMME

 

You don’t have to put yourself in color if you look at your name,

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.

 

 

 

 

IGNOTE TOMB

 

Corpse No. 2,

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.

 

 

 

AUSTRIANS HERE ARE STRICTER THAN THE BOURBONS

 

The Austrian, of true Aryan stock, is very strict, does not charm,

achtung kaputt kameraden, demands maximum flexibility

so as to put the whole of Europe back in the 90,

bombs the Milan stock exchanges absolutely free,

better than Radetzky or Bava Beccaris did.

 

We could try again with a tobacco strike,

mixing hashish with marijuana with detachment,

although I don’t think the lotto strike would work,

we are too far removed from the uprisings of 1848,

now the whole nation is pulling to get to the morning,

dreaming of cashing a pair or a five of a kind.

 

Hoping for a return of the Bourbon dynasty.

the Milanese are not accustomed to revolution,

pawing, clamoring, shitting you off,

returning the next day to the office to work,

not having the energy of the good-tempered Sicilians,

the only special-status region to protest with pitchforks.

 

Here the Austrians are stricter than the Bourbons,

Merkel thunders from Brussels threatening resolutions

of the European Council, in which sit supranationally paid

the various front men of one or another multinational corporation,

undecided, with all-Teutonic scientific rigor,

whether to bankrupt Greece or a farm in Valcamonica.

 

BORN BACKWARDS

 

Why do I keep writing?

B., like Bangladesh, was

sixteen years old, on the windowsill

of the balcony of a Milanese high school,

but sixteen years was not enough

For God to embrace her in his leap.

R., as Romania, was

thirteen years old, feeling a hundred,

and no angel

was flying by her side.

E., as Ecuador, was

thirteen years old, with no Genoa

reminded her of Quito,

in the solitude of her dress

off-brand, disintegrated.

C., like China, was

twelve years old, worn out quickly,

looking out on a balcony

with the desire not to see the world,

throwing herself into the vortex

of performance anxiety.

Their names are not difficult

to forget, they are names

– like me-born in reverse,

pressed against the glass

of the windows of life

jumping from the asphalt.

 

 

THE FORGOTTEN CHILDREN’S PARADISE

 

Forgotten children’s paradise,

there play dead children asleep

in hot cars, without relief,

victims of mnemonic crises from work fatigue

that make them forget budgets, meetings or certificates.

 

Little girls play in a relentless summer,

indifferent to the sun that has dehydrated them,

free to soar in tides of air

in spite of the bad moments spent in respiratory crisis,

without having to feel heat and thirst.

 

Forgotten children’s paradise,

dead children asleep play there

strangled by the insecurity of belts,

eagerly waiting to re-embrace, without rancour,

those who murdered them.

 

 

THE DISEASE INVECTIVE

 

To discover the causes of my dysenteric experience at every event,

they poured ink, a huge mistake, into the cannula of the gastroscope,

the medical pathologists, and diagnosed me with invective disease,

associated with literary reflux, surging down my oesophagus and oxidising my gums.

 

When, as a cynical dog with a collar, sniffing out the smell of bad morals or the stench of egopathy,

I can’t tolerate the other-worlder, a victim of excessive xenophobia,

I forget all forms of fair play, sink into the fog of the Berserker,

furious and black as a Zulu forced to put up with an Afrikaner,

speak Roma to Sinti, Sinti to Gypsy, Gypsy to Romanian, Romanian to Roma

and I can’t stop myself shouting Hitler Aleikhem Shalom.

 

If I don’t digest you, I’ll hear ‘hou, hou, hou’, like Leonidas at Thermopylae,

identifying the worms encircling me, hence the rise in my eosinophils,

I emit excessive hydrochloric acid and stop disinhibiting the proton pump

with the despair of Mazinger rejected by the bionic woman,

spitting hectolitres of cyanide in my face with the skill of Naja nigricollis

and it annoys me to be condemned to do anything.

 

To understand the ethos of my life in need of ataraxia,

the barbarian meets the citizen in the chôra of anti-‘poetry’,

all of you, no one excluded, will be forced to venture as a group

in the labyrinthine meanderings of my invective.

 

 

CARMINA NON DANT DAMEN

 

The story of a coin is of no interest to anyone

two sides never so bold to see each other face to face

on one side imprinted the effigy of a queen,

austere, draped in silks and thirsty of drapery,

on the other the image of a minstrel, clad in a mantle of earth,

surrounded by the golden sadness of war songs.

 

The enchantment of love turns into coin

two hands, arranged one with care and other artisanship,

shake hands, and two faces, two metic eyes

protrude from the copper reliefs,

keeping alive, embraced, suspended in the void,

the one observing the amenity of a realm

where rivers run free, flowers smile,

clothed in forests and fruit forever,

the other gazing into hell.

 

My art is powerless

to cast spells so influential

to keep two faces timelessly suspended in the void,

mixing in forge the two worlds

into a single world where minstrel

and austere queen harmonise thoroughly.

 

Minstrel, continue to sing

your useless song with a broken heart,

waiting for fragments of tears

to flow again

in the blood of a halved love.

 

 

Ivan Pozzoni

 

Ivan Pozzoni is an internationally recognized writer and poet whose work has been widely acclaimed across literary and artistic circles. Before ceasing all forms of writing in 2018, he won prestigious awards such as the Raduga, Montano, and Strega Prizes. His poetry has been featured extensively, with Alberto Bertoni including him in the Atlas of Contemporary Italian Poets and numerous appearances in Gradiva.

Pozzoni’s verses have been translated into over 25 languages, including French, English, Spanish, Macedonian, Greek, Albanian, Serbian, Bosnian, Croatian, Slovenian, Romanian, Bulgarian, Russian, Azerbaijani, Uzbek, Kyrgyz, Tajik, Hindi, Bengali, Arabic, Persian, Pashto, Sindhi, Chinese, Korean, and Japanese, among others.

A firm believer in internationalism, he collaborates with literary magazines across more than 100 nations, spanning Albania, Greece, Kosovo, Macedonia, Croatia, Serbia, Bosnia, Slovenia, Hungary, Romania, the Czech Republic, Russia, France, Spain, Portugal, Brazil, the United States, England, Africa, India, Ukraine, Mongolia, Poland, and South America.

Pozzoni played a pivotal role in the NeoN-Avangardia movement and authored the Antimanifesto, which was endorsed by intellectual giants such as Zygmunt Bauman, Umberto Eco, and Giorgio Barberi Squarotti, along with other prominent scholars and artists. Until 2018, he was regarded as one of the leading figures in international contemporary art. Currently associated with Kolektivne NSEAE, Ivan Pozzoni remains an influential presence in global literary and artistic discourse.