I Didn't Ask to Be Crazy is a collection of poetry and personal essays centered around mental illness.

I Didn't Ask to Be Crazy

A pupa is a space of safety, the shelter after a storm, and a time to rebuild; a messy metamorphosis before freedom.

Pupa: Growth & Metamorphosis

It is a confessional and a calling to find your own light in the frenzy and madness that is life. 

Magic Lives In Girls

"When sleep eludes, I commune with myself, with the histories of my mind that haunt me, the way I haunt the halls of my home."

Embers in the Dark

"These women did not matter to anyone, especially not law enforcement. Whatever happened to them was their fault, a byproduct of their profession. It filled Namina with rage. These women did matter, and she would do her best to protect them."

The Reaper - Part Two

If I gobble them up like frosted cupcakes,
absorb their wraith essence, their pale hue.
I could take their brightness, their effervescence.

Effervescence

I swallow these seeds whole /
No taste to savor / only to stomach / 
These are bitter / fluid burning my tongue as it drips /

Memory Arils

I am on Fire

"We are of matter / and of nothing / 

of time beginning / of time ending / and the endless stretch 

in-between /"

Sweet Milky Way

Sink deep / into an imagination /

running wild / each jagged piece /

A new scenario / a new person / 

A universe birthed anew / hauntingly bright /

yet surrounded by shadow /

Kaleidoscope View

"Dreams are not reality, yet they are stealing from mine."

Dreams Are Not Reality

A melancholic beauty; roots that run deep. 
Slip inside the swinging vines, under the cover
of the Weeping mother

Gathering, Death Call, and Melancholic Willow

The knife does not remember the wound / 
yet it drips in the blood of the people that do / 
I was born with sharp metal held to my neck / used 
by my mother expertly /

Knife to My Kneck

"Here I float, outside of myself
Viewing myself through cloudy glass
I am untethered, unbound
Careening through this space with no way down
No way back"

Through the Mirror

Anyhow, in the last year, it feels like a flood gate has opened in my brain. Memories I once thought dead are resurrecting themselves like blood-thirsty zombies. My mind is a battlefield, and I've been thrown into the war woefully unprepared. 

A Vile Action on a Night I Forgot

"That I led blindly into the unknown, 
just for a taste of what it feels like to be alive."

Anchor for Amphitrite

Original digital collage work, title "In My Dreams"

Plenty - Art

Cells from one unlucky egg expanded into stars within the cosmos created for me. Not a
tremendous open void of vacuous space but a cocoon of warm liquid; tethered to my mother, the Sun. 

I Am the Universe Born Anew

One morning / I rose with the sun /
felt its warmth on my skin / I saw her in the mirror /
Emerging from my widow’s peak / she wore the armor of gray /

Maiden of Gray

Namina had stopped counting how many souls she had delivered, and there was no point in keeping track anymore. Her Ker, an ancient spirit that feeds on violence and blood, was never full, and her servitude would never end.

The Reaper - Part One

Before I found my circle of salt / I had only my bedroom window /
My only comfort a closed door / a finally silent home /
Perhaps the salt circle was my silent tears shed /

Love to the Moon Mother

“To you, those dead women symbolize your power. But to me, they are a sign of your inherent weakness as a human being, as a man.”

The Reaper - Part Three

Womanhood is a gift from biology / Femininity, a choice and a curse /
Existing as either / a target to those who stopped seeing me / as a person /
When I buried my baby teeth /

sadeebee

Books

Selected work