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

Collapsed

When I experience grief
I open and everything enters.
There is no space.
I’m suffocated by spirits.
I’m blotchy, dry, aching.

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

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..”

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..”

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

Newness

What news!

The arrival

And the departure

Both equal in value and pleasure

To the adventurous wondering soul