Feral

This poem imagines liberation as a return to the feral.

Cages, collars, and chains become symbols for the expectations and constraints that require us to suppress our nature in exchange for belonging. Breaking free is therefore not simply an escape, but a reclamation of instinct, desire, embodiment, and self-trust.

Here, becoming feral does not mean abandoning responsibility.

It means reclaiming the authority to decide how we will live.

The phrase “feral freedom” first appeared in Unbecoming.

By the time I wrote this poem two days later, I wanted to know what that freedom actually felt like.

For much of my life, belonging seemed to come with conditions. There were rules for being good, successful, responsible, lovable, respectable, spiritual, and worthy. Some were explicit. Many were not.

I learned how to live inside them.

But increasingly, they felt like cages.

“Feral” became a useful word because it suggested something different from simply becoming rebellious. A feral creature has escaped domestication. It has returned to living according to instincts that captivity required it to suppress.

That is the reclamation this poem imagines.

The teeth, claws, howling, dirt, trees, water, and physical movement all deliberately return the speaker to the body and the natural world. After so much of my unbecoming involved questioning inherited ideas about who I should be, there was something powerful about imagining a self that could trust what it actually felt.

But I don't think instinct means impulse should become unquestionable.

The destination of the poem is not the absence of authority, self-control, or devotion.

It is the reclamation of it:

“Freedom filled and
Fiercely forged
In my own
Firm felt
Authority”

That distinction matters to me.

Freedom without discernment can become another kind of captivity. What I wanted was the ability to listen inwardly—to recognize my desires, needs, boundaries, values, and instincts without immediately subordinating them to someone else's expectations.

Even the poem's relationships are imagined through that freedom:

“But freely got
And freely held
With no shackling
Enslavery”

To be feral, in this sense, is not to reject connection.

It is to reject connection that requires captivity.

The freedom I was reaching toward was not freedom from everything.

It was the freedom to belong without being owned, to choose without being domesticated, and to trust myself enough to live from an authority I could actually call my own.