The ballad of Peggy and Pedro barked out by the punkbestials

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

Ivan Pozzoni, a renowned poet and writer 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.

View of the Tiber looking towards Vatican City – Wikipedia photo

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

Centered on the astonishing idea

That love is a matter of non-Euclidean geometry.

***

HOTEL ACAPULCO

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 center 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?