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

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

Haunting

Smokey listeners

Reaching for the shallow limbs of black

They sink and wail to discover life

And so I remain, printed and somewhat flaky 

Together, forested in fictions

I lie to myself when I stretch out of the hopeful comforts

I’m picked as bark

The dog days are quite holy; haunting 

The body was muddy and dug out of void

Being, holy as well

Peer through 

Identify me, then leave me to be, leave me alone

As I grow feral to the moans of cicadas 

I will touch the golden skies in faith

The ones I indulge in and tell stories about

Form

She sways and she fades

Condensing as we name her audacious

Sometimes I shout it too

With her I had no clue

.

My love comes in all forms

She’s cold and lukewarm

When she melts I melt with her

I have faith in her rigid lorn

.

Chant and sing these warnings

She is everything

She is nothing within

On the mountain where I placed her

She was my only friend

.

I was free to scrutinize her

She was decay and serpent

Offered me to experience life freely

She wouldn’t dare come with me

I’d repent to see her nearly

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

Newness

What news!

The arrival

And the departure

Both equal in value and pleasure

To the adventurous wondering soul