From Surgipelago, the Beach Surgery encyclopedia
a portrait of an eruption
This article is about the poem left on the narrator after the UN workshop. For the eruption event, see Antinomicity.
A Portrait of an Eruption is a poem of uncertain provenance, said to have been left (or written) on C. W. Smith's stomach after his public breakdown at the closing dinner of a UN workshop in Shanbudia. According to his account in Antinomicity, a stranger approached him as he "erupted"—became "a volcano"—and left behind only the poem and absence.
The full text is unknown to the fandom archive. Various fragments circulate in secondary sources, but none have been verified against an original. Some scholars argue the poem is retroactively invented to explain the eruption itself; others maintain it is a genuine lost artifact whose loss is itself thematic. The poem's title suggests it was a description or witnessing of the narrator's breakdown, possibly addressed to Katita-figures (a portrait of chaos, of bodily transgression).
References appear obliquely in ''Fellow Disjecta'', where the narrator recalls "a text left on me like a scar that faded before I could read it." The mystery has spawned theses, fan reconstructions, and disputed "recovered" versions. No academic source has authenticated any proposed full text. The poem's absence may be its truest form: a work that exists only as the impression it left.