Old canzone

Found this old one (from 2020). Keeping up the implicit promise of my post backlog (which is good and also pay-walled because I need moneyyy please and thank you) and doing more repeat end-word type forms. At some point I’m gonna do something else, maybe some prose, even! But for the time being I wanna keep this ball rolling.

This is more indicative of how I used to write these forms, with long, prose-y lines and a narrative throughline. Anyway, enjoy!

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COLD CANZONE

It never killed someone, to be a little cold,
says with gusto us; we are out and it's a winding night.
A chill strikes one of our spines, and that spine shivers. “Cold,”
says you or someone else who isn't me, who won't react to cold.
Suddenly an emphasis presents itself contrary: the moth-worn holes
that ride each of our sweaters and make the weather (cold)
seem cruel in this, our winding night inside the cold.
When first we left our respective brick buildings,
and made our way to each other at some other and old brick building
to have our first drinks, not one of us considered the cold.
I think this is a song of being young, and all that that could mean:
a fight for “honesty,” our flights from safety, to see a world so mean.

I thought, once, to frore my heart would grant me endless means.
With which I could, of course, do what? It doesn't matter in the cold.
And anyway I've changed. What's more, you say, you meant
in interjecting mainly that I just should shut up. You are mean
to me often like this when you get drunk, our walk tonight
being no exception. But I see what you mean:
I really will just ramble, past any sense or meaning.
This, too, comes from youth: it is one of youth's charm's many holes
to be with ideas so ablaze one's oblivious, talking holes
through each one of one's friends' skulls, when all one meant...
but here's a conversation lull. We pass the Polish Men's Club building,
where, we're terrified to think, sit men accomplished in building

brick edifices, by whose competence a general “we” was built
block by block, but who, tonight, just seem calloused and tough, mean
hombres who hate the sight of us, whose resentment must be building
up. God knows that I appreciate broad shoulders and strong buildings,
that in inverse proportion to the scare that colds
our speaking in adjacency to these white ethnicized builders
each of our faggish quantities flutter, thinking of swarthed arms building,
that for our wretched souls in the dark of night
the secret hope is for that stolid bohunk brow to take our nights
sideways, in stalls in fetid restrooms of one of their handmade buildings.
Again a gust of wind reminds us of the moth-ate holes
in our clothes and the fragility of our bodies: how soon we'll be in holes!

The thrill at potential desolation passing, we enter our last watering-hole.
You break the silence. How? I (too busy caught up in all that building
tension no one's mentioned) don't know. And soon our talk is circling that hole
it always does. You know the one. The one my more asshole-
ish self would throw down here to show to all the high sum of meanness
and cruelty in us. But I would much more likely bore a hole
through my own temple than confess my sins with yours. We're in this hole
together after all, my friends. This grave, so wide and deep and often cold,
is destiny for sure. I watch you knock a seventh or so cold
one back and remember an obscene joke about bottle necks and holes.
The only refuge for a mind like mine (or is it ours yet?) in the night
is the gutter. Sometimes I wonder if behind all our eyes is endless night,

but our friend is right to tell me: shut up, enjoy the night!
while wistfully (and drunkenly) I peer down the urinal drain hole.
How melancholy constricts me so quickly, like a blanket in the night,
How hot, down my throat, is disappointment's mix, my cap for tonight.
And caked in this urine smell I wonder, if my heart were a building
and it were burning, would you wet the flame and steam the night?
Or, if all you had were urine, would I let you? What if, tonight,
you spoke freely, and I did too, and we were free, to say and mean?
What then? Back at the bar you can't answer, because your stomach got mean.
You, between your knees, are damp and done for for the night.
We wander back out to the street. Miraculous night, it's no longer cold.
Or, you’d correct if you weren’t trashed, our drinks gird us from the cold.

We drop you off and stand around, trying (failing) to feel the cold.
Standing, sullen, in our ambiguous night, our sideways boring night, the night
sky above our heads is pocked with pins of light like holes
to another sky that is bright instead of dark, which bears down on buildings
the opposite, exact, of the ones surrounding us tonight, whatever that means.