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

She Will Return

You’ve inflicted a wound
down the length of her spine.
Sabotaging the currents
to maintain her movements
give way to the wind.

With the immense distance it provides,
she will carry on.
Her skin sticks and glows a little,
glistens in the sunlight.

She’ll return
and destroy all that you are,
leaving behind
trails of ash and stains

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)

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

Thirsty

I’ve perished

They told me so

A few times

I’m tongue tied

A thing in the undercurrent

A hole in one

When I woke I was thirsty

An insatiable existence

I know I’ll be punished

I know it’s a sin

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