I Want to Be Ugly

I feel more and more feral.

I want a different word. Unhinged.

I want to be ugly. I want to be a mess—show my ass.

Bit by bit, I’m letting loose again. Saying more. Saying less. Using my face and body to communicate.

It is noticeable.

I want them to see my wholeness. I won’t shy away.

I play with myself, my thoughts, my perceptions. I challenge. I rebel.

I believe in letting the darkness play out. Something is ready this era. I have wants. I’m human too. And I’m a generous woman.

I want to be afraid and safe.

I’ve been questioning reality and mortality. Getting nowhere close to anything that soothes and makes sense.

I am struggling to surrender to the care I feel.

I’m realizing I move similarly to my dad

In and out.

How I refuse to acknowledge that others are attached to me and that they are a person. How I’ve lost some humanness through the cracks of me.

Emotionally, I intellectualize my emotions and others’. I feel deeply, but I’m not connected to my feelings fully. I float above, observing.

Solitude protected me from rejection.

Solitude protected me from the noise of the world.

Solitude protected my journey to myself.

I ended up alone while becoming everything.
I am questioning everything about relationships.
I see what part of me must die.
A big chunk of my identity.

How pathetic. How humbling these human feelings.

I bite my tongue. Resentment fills my mouth as acid.

Behind the barricades
The grip on surrender

I found my sun
By my bedside
On a river
It didn’t take me
Where I’m going
Oh, the faces
I meet

A piece of her
Crawled from her insides
When they were all fresh and overdue
When nobody wanted her
She couldn’t keep herself

I’ve been delving into a new territory with my art.

Bit by bit, I’m letting loose again.

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

Ripe and Mean

When we went without
I forgot my name
Things were not good
We’d be ripe and mean
We’d beg and fight
Skin splitting
Play tug of war with our faces
Growl through negative space
I am awake
I am awake
I am awake
I plead
insanity
I give
him control
Still
painting him in contrast

Nest of Sorrow

I just sit in my nest.
And wail and cry and sob.
I’m fragile and I delight in explosion.
At the edge of grief
I’m swallowed by it whole.

— from Repetitions of Ruin  
(incantations from the same wound)

I Wore You

we had the same conversations like it was yesterday
i wore blue for days and days straight
i wore all my fibers as you
i knew you were blue too
i fasted
i was corrupt
you wouldn’t let my burn touch a thing
you laughed in the face of it

Bug On A Wall

“Bug on a wall, doe eyed, pressed to a window, steamed and well, comfortable..

I handled the last storm.

I’ve been meeting people who look like me again. I must admit I’m timid and shy to approach..”

Shadow Snake

Too slick to trust

A shadow snake

Still I dance through the teeth of fate

I beg the God with bloodshot eyes

Could I strike with the soil?

Can I rewrite my sky?

Forgive me now, or let me go

Forgive me—flesh and stone

Tryna find my way alone

Truth don’t come but confesses

Still learning how to break

Behind tints possessive

Made of Moon

The river split all too soon

I was made of moon

So I spared the connection and tuned the loving beast

Who chips it’s nails to soften the beatings

Source

These wings don’t flock

I am not forced by any wind

Ungrounded from the land and molds

Behold everyone, the individual

A pure source

Pure eyes

A soul who’s unknown

Doesn’t quite belong anywhere

Found in anything and everything; every being