WINTERREISE; OR THE UNIFIED THEORY OF EVERYTHING

I arrived a stranger
I'll depart a stranger

Why the look of glass

Push these phenomena
Into the porcelain workshop
Of history note the nodes of
Collectvity transposing
The alienating thrum
As for us rather than against
Us mark it all as music
On the familiar staves
Animate the critique of everyday life
Lean into the conjunctions
Different days sharing
Today’s legato light
A light that massages the day's
Legible codes into illegible streets
I did what was left for me
To do in this lifetime
I divided time into digestible
Libations for the dead

Everything coheres

December is for the solstice
January is one long Turing test
February is for the Penguin poets
March is for the present tense

Nothing coheres

A river of ice sweetens
The mind’s perceptions
My face aglow with lost
Songs horrifying songs
Originally meant for a tenor
To be sung
on some future stage
Thinking of the octaves I played
For my nephew or rather
The ones he played for me
Octaves from
a song of brusque
Cello strokes and elegiac violins

The dog’s tremor is the night's
Metronome she and
I equally
lost in the wilderness
Of microplastics and simulacra
Conjured by server farms buried
In the deserts of Nevada
As the ever-widening gyre of
The Great Pacific Garbage Patch expands
Its center everywhere its circumference
Nowhere

Last winter Hours before the solstice we
Found ourselves
Arranging chairs to
Make room for Alma's
Adagietto her name
Means soul in a language
Adjacent to our own
Moving the
Furniture in a house with a mortgage
Equivalent to more than twenty
Years of my labor at my
Current professorial salary
Listening to bows running
Against catgut melody
Loosened from maple and
Spruce reshaped into
Machines worth tens of
Thousands of dollars years of
Tutelage needed
To release this music
A music diegetically suited for the scene

The student who
Wrote of the
Vividness of trees in a
Landscape that marks
The transition from
Romanticism’s early
Impressionism to
The objective
representation of the
Natural world in Realism

The strange pastoral of
Delaware’s shell
Corporations
Infinite fiefdoms
Loaded with
Sublime sums of wealth

The student
Discoursing on the
Fullness of life
The student who
Once asked why
The words on the
Page can’t just
Mean what they
Mean

Walking through
Prose’s dark aperture
I found
A mirror-image of myself
A poet-father traveling
Through a Lonely-Planet version of the
Balkans with a mouth leaking a
Romance language spoken on
The shores of the Black Sea
Where exiled Ovid wrote poems
Of sorrow
A voice seeded with modernism
Nascent in its demands for avant-garde
Disjunctions / juxtapositions

Winterized skull
I was experiencing
A slow-moving
Stroke a prolonged
Ego-death that
Lasted the length
Of a lifetime but
Contracted into
Minutes everything
Arriving seconds late the
Dull brain perplexes and retards
The impossible fullness of
Existence
No viewless wings of poesy
To elevate my visions
The overwhelming details
Insignificant yet overwrought
From the lavender fragranced
Green waste bags I use to pick up
Frozen winter shit
To the parade of gifts at our
Door to the smear of red on
A square of toilet paper to
The far-too-late thank you
I addressed to no one
I had thought myself on
Friendlier terms with the
Warm machine
Under the aegis
Of highs
Unheard of
I was released from
My Faraday Cage
In order to
Come into
Contact with
Sights that may
Reanimate my
Dead syllabics
Or kill me as
I shoplift fascia
From a poem I admire
And youth from a
Poem I've read translating them
Into this barbaric yawp
My nation’s grim
Idioms of stand your
Ground and castle
Doctrine I’ve made
Beautiful poems
Obscene and numbingly
Pornographic just by
Bringing them into
This language still
Uncertain of how
This shard of
Glitter made it
Into my phone’s
Screen I’m always
Surprised at how
Ubiquitous the
Toxicity of our
Lives are how I’m
Always uncertain
How to sing the only
Song I know to sing
My tongue made
Useless by this
Concrete I chew my
Mouth pixelated by my phone’s
Stray eye the diminishing size of
The patrolman's car in the
Rearview brings ghosts to the
Fray hypocrite lectrice I was the
Novel you were reading on a
Sunday while I spent Saturday
Swaddled in a chemical caul
Of self-improvement
Dear lecteur I was these plastic
Daffodils I failed to metaphorize
These ersatz vines of verdant
Dittoing rising to nowhere a
Proper symbol for this generic
Ennui paralyzing my limbic system
Dear lectrice I was worse
Than generic I was a body
Filled with cloud consciousness
The inability to make legible the
Scale of tragedy the child
Enfriezed by the train’s orange
Yellow bucket seats her rainbow
Backpack a losing argument against
The lowlights of the subway car
The migrant we all ignore my calf
Strained and pained the lack
Of any earthly remedy

Note: “Winterreise” contains borrowed language from the following sources: a music review by Greg Kot, John Keats’s “Ode to a Nightingale,” and Radiohead’s “Fitter Happier.”

George Fragopoulos is the author of the poetry collection Heretical Materialism: A Pasolini Triptych and the chapbooks 14 Poems in 516 Lines and Days of April-May 2022. A chapbook, Res Derelictae, is forthcoming from Antiphony. His poems and translations from the Greek have appeared in Antiphony, Circumference, The Found Poetry Review, North Dakota Quarterly, Y/P, and Works and Days. He is co-founder of Beautiful Days Press, and he co-edits the journal Works and Days. He lives in Queens, NY, with his wife and daughter.