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

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

October 7, 2021

More trauma, more anger. You’d always ask if I was mad at you. Was it not what you wanted when we repeated “No”. You had to go and get yourself killed. Well now you have it. I am so f****** mad at you, and I hope you know it. I’m so angry at you, and I feel at the core I always have been. I’m pissed off at this soulless body. Explain the voices or rather the voice of you that haunts my mind attempting to console me after destroying me. I’m not enough, and nothing I ever do for anybody will ever be. 

How could you not stay here for me, for X. My sun adored you and you left him. That same day I texted you a picture of him and told you about how I see you in him. How could you abandon us in this way. We saw each other all summer, you pulled up to my house whenever you wanted. I gave you allcolades told you I was proud. You were doing better, wanted to be a father, a grandpa, and you did your best. So why didn’t you fight for us, why didn’t you protect yourself, why didn’t you open your eyes and count your blessings. 

Right now I sit beside you and you are unresponsive and I swear you’re here because your vessels reflexes are acting up. The way you continue to see right on through all the love that surrounds you is nothing different than how you denied it our whole lives. Maybe we were truly your problem, maybe I. Never good enough.

Honestly f*** you. Though I still wish you peace, just know I won’t have it.

I’m sorry too. You said you’d be here, that if I needed anything… My whole life, you just keep breaking my heart

January 15, 2023

I love deep feelings. Feelings that stops you in your tracks. Experiencing feelings with self awareness is even more enticing. I can do this dance and really put my foot in it. Really break a sweat. With the wisdoms of the future as a tether. Although the idea of becoming the crazy lady who wears mumus, cheetah print thongs, reads tea and palms and can tell when you’re lying but makes a game of playing along, is mad enticing.