Paean to a 1996 Psychotic Breakdown (Ariel Riveros Pavez)

Endless digging
like a clown in
any Shakespeare play.

When psuche realised
that she breathed
with the plant

time became a taught rope
of sense and nonsense
and happiness

and it didn’t matter
if the word plant
was an actual plant

it didn’t matter
I thought numbers
were things
that I could ask
their what of?

The jumping
over chasms
faith has enough holes

it’s a ground I walked
M Rosencroyzer
and Guildernstern died

and I dug
sung gave
clouds names.

The play noted
man bites dog
in my suburbs today

and I claw this truth
by nail
and hammer

and sawfish tooth
hacking at the stone
that is the memory.

I planted a flag
on the forgetting island
it held writing

the soil of the island down to
magma silo depth
forged on herald

was no colour
symbol or army
cheer

but the plant
that breathed
with psuche

intervening
prior towards
my vegetal flesh

swich licour antigua
was the plant
was actually constellation
as signified

the signifier became flesh
the signified was anything else
universals.

Becoming a plant
in my own spyring
this scope
of Uraniborg as glass.

Becoming the signifier
not the word
the signified pointed at
the universe

picture the butterfly nebula
blown apart by a studio
of airconditioners

was the signified
meaning was image

signifier over signified
or here as fractured matheme

word is

Sf

Sd

so

word as becoming the thing it describes
___________________________

D

and

D = E + F

E being an image of the universe
elicited from just the butterfly
nebula

and F being a universal image
or universal thought-image

E and F are chiasm to each other

D there is the chiasm conflated.

The word becoming the thing it describes
is the loss of the vinculum of the sign
and all conflations and condensations
occuring from that loss

and only then did the sign reassemble
to the psychotogram

as there’s no allegory
and just talk

it’s a map.

Borges makes the map a territory. Jabes’ deserts sparked.

Some maps are lost in themselves
and territories that we’ve not onedered but twodered
and now we’ve threedered and can fourded.

I can afford my fare and fairness today.

That’s the price paid and no quid in return
but for the quiddity of wool and wolves
is where I can see ahead
but I’m not ending there

poetry being the play —
writing the consumable
thing, that cost me.


Ariel Riveros is a Sydney-based writer. He was the founding editor of Australian Latino Press and organiser of The Blue Space Poetry Jam readings. His works have appeared in various publications including Southerly, Contrappasso Magazine, Mascara Review, FourW, Verity La, ETZ, Forgetting is So Long: An Anthology of Australian Love Poetry and Journal of Postcolonial Text. Ariel has featured at QPF 2017, Wollongong Writers Festival and Poetry at Sappho’s, amongst others. His chapbook of short stories Self Imposed House Arrest was published through Blank Rune Press in 2015. Ariel was also the winner of the 2016 Schizophrenia Fellowship of NSW Poetry Prize.