The Alchemy of Ache: Poetry as Portal, Memory as Ritual, Writing as Survival

I sometimes peel myself for fun
forgetting I am dripping

I devour this holy pomegranate
for my last meal

While the world makes love
to cope with flesh
I vow to touch the earth
with the courtesy of life in mind

Through every door
every portal
I walk
fall
burn

and come back
to myself
again
and again

– Freegrandmaa





I’ve never been a tidy writer. I don’t write from outlines. I don’t plan.
Because pain rarely makes sense while you’re inside it. Because memory doesn’t arrive in full sentences. Because healing isn’t clean. And neither is truth.

My hands have always been frantic, scratching, scribbling, collaging, bleeding. Before I had language for what I was feeling, I had survival instinct. My chaos moved through my fingers. I drew. I cut. I self-harmed. I wrote. It wasn’t for performance. It was so I wouldn’t drown.

When I finally found poetry, it didn’t feel like art. It felt like company.

I remember sitting alone by a stream in Ohio. I had followed a lover to a place where no one wanted me. Not him, not my family. Isolation cracked me open. Trauma rose in the silence like smoke. I was drowning in rejection, misunderstood and invisible, waiting to feel like someone again.

That’s when the butterfly showed up. It lingered. It saw me. It didn’t save me, but it stayed long enough to let me feel seen. And in that moment, the words came like a river. Unfiltered, unconscious, mythic. The poem didn’t try to make sense. It just felt real. And for the first time in a long time, I felt real too.

I don’t write logically. I write neurologically. I write like the body remembers. Trauma doesn’t give you stories, it gives you sensations. The brain breaks memory into fragments. You remember a sound, a flinch, a smell. Not a plot.

My poetry mirrors that. That’s why my lines come in flashes. Why my metaphors feel mythic. Why there’s no narrative arc, only spirals, symbols, sobs, silences.

Writing that follows the rhythm of memory, not structure. Writing that reveals the subconscious, not logic. Writing that bleeds in a language the nervous system can trust. I didn’t learn this. I survived into it.

I am what I call an underworld translator, a shadow scribe, a nervous system medium.
I write from inside the burn.. I speak from the parts of the self most people try to avoid. The underworld is not hell, it’s the unspoken. The grief you buried. The version of yourself that exists beneath the mask. The shadow self waiting not to haunt, but to be integrated.

Sometimes, I wonder if I’m just romanticizing it all. If shadow work is just another addiction. If I’m still self-harming, but this time with metaphors. If I’m scripting pain to feel in control.

But this is also true: there is no light without this walk. There is no peace without knowing what almost destroyed you. And writing is how I know the difference. If I let it be ugly, feral, fragmented, then I know I’m not hiding anymore.

Because when you don’t face your underworld, it doesn’t disappear, it mutates. Into numbness. Into avoidance. Into loneliness. Into cruelty. It passes down. What you refuse to integrate, your children inherit.

I write because I didn’t

By the Door of the Music Room

by the door of the music room
what does one do
when sound hums like prophecy
to the rhythm of one’s soul

spoiling all the way home
anointed with myrrh
a finger on the temple

what does one do
by the door of the music room

Sacred Beauty, Silent Battles

I was taught to be beautiful, no matter what I was going through.

A sacred ritual passed down—lipstick, clean clothes, perfume. Even in despair, my outer world had to glow. I’ve mastered the art of seeming fine.

High-functioning depression means I show up glowing—
even when I’m collapsing on the inside.
Because I was taught: no matter how you feel, look good so no one would know.

People assume I’m okay because I look okay.

Because I’m pretty. Because I dress well. Because I smile. Because I post.

But that’s the mask. That’s the part I learned young:
if you look put together, maybe no one will ask too many questions.
My mother raised and instilled in me to always show up looking good—no matter what. And so I did. Even when I was quietly dealing with depression, eating disorders, suicidal thoughts/attempts, a bottomless abyss of self-hate etc. I never wanted anyone to know. I just wanted to survive.

And now that I’m older that’s backfired. Now when I say, “I’m not okay,” people respond with, “But you look so good.”

As if beauty is proof of wellness.

As if pain can’t wear lipstick.

Not all sadness screams.
Some of it moves quietly—wrapped in silk, masked with laughter, walking through the world unnoticed.

High-functioning depression is being praised for your strength, carrying sorrow with elegance. All the while drowning in silence.
It’s shining bright, yet being invisible because you’ve mastered the art of seeming fine.

It’s exhausting.

Must

“One mustn’t fret, but instead breathe. Fall into the void of life. Smile, hands up. Embrace the ride..”

“One must ground daily with the percussion of the past performing. One must be here, find it wherever you are..”

Out

Spread out

To disappear

I’m distracted

My mind’s not near

My mind’s tuned in

Tuned out

I’m not walking forward

Spaced out

I’m a broken clock

A broken record

And I’m upside-down

Pink

Cotton pink undertones
Close by with gentle age
She was creamy, so soft
My eyes sparkled as we met
Pixie baby looking all confused
Going for a ride with mine
I sit silent
I study her magic
The way her skin rainbows
The concern in her delicate sweet face when I leave

Reason

I always come back to sadness

Maybe it’s a shape shifting anger

Maybe we’ve hung her; together

But it’s all I ever knew, it’s whom I make true intricate love to

I inflicted upon me paired with hesitations and soon to be’s

cause well maybe I’m human

I sink through all your deadly seas

I sort through my pieces of wool and used flannels and cloth

And I touch the human in every passerby knowing it’s never enough

I touch the heart that aches with stone burning parallels

I touch the mouths through mountains of victims as the dead sings farwells

I vow to be untouched

It’s not enough to breathe in and exhale my stomach, my liver; my heart

It’s hard enough to wake alert and dress up the rest with the earth’s hardened dirt

Soul tied to a suit and some layers that aren’t mine

But to most it’s fine, some say quite divine

I couldn’t harm a fly; I wish to kill a billion

And so

I harm the self that promises to let things go (let things sow)

Burdened by the death of each solitary season

Hands pressed in pulses pleading to be granted the sights of a hermits reason