A Fabulous Freak: A Poem About Being Different and Finding Your Power
- Mark Bird
- 3 days ago
- 3 min read
Looking back at photographs of myself as a child, a teenager and a young man, I can see so many different versions of me. The carefree child, the nervous schoolboy, the rebellious teenager and the young man still working things out were all real.
Perhaps the Real You is not one final version waiting somewhere at the end.
Perhaps the Real You is all of them.
We change, experiment, hide, reveal, stumble and grow, but that does not mean the people we once were have disappeared. They travel with us. Every version leaves something behind and carries something forward.
That thought sits inside A Fabulous Freak too. The child who feels unseen today does not have to wait for some perfect future self to become valuable. There is already something worth seeing in them now.
A Fabulous Freak (pantoum poem for kids)
divine, unique: a fabulous freak
a thing they can’t yet see
for now the only thing they seek:
their popularity
a thing they can’t yet see
beyond today, through years, is how
their popularity
will baton-pass from Then to Now
beyond today, through years, is how
they’ll wish they’d known Real You
will baton-pass from Then to Now
how did your dreams come true?
they’ll wish they’d known Real You
for now the only thing they seek:
how did your dreams come true?
divine, unique: a fabulous freak
Mark Bird
I grew up as a gay kid in the 1970s and 80s, although I did not yet have the confidence, language or freedom to fully understand myself that way.
But I did not grow up defined by one thing.
I was the funny kid, the frightened kid, the determined kid and the kid who refused to give up. I was positive and insecure, confident and terrified, loud in some rooms and almost invisible in others. Like every child, I was made from contradictions.
They were not easy times to feel different. School playgrounds could be cruel places and children quickly learned which parts of themselves were safest to hide. I often felt that other children had been handed instructions for how to belong, while I was trying to work everything out for myself.
That experience helped shape A Fabulous Freak, a poem about being different, feeling outside the circle and eventually recognising the power of becoming fully yourself.
But I do not want the poem to be defined only by my own experience.
It is for any child who dresses differently, thinks differently, speaks differently, dreams differently or simply cannot understand why popularity seems so important to everyone else.
When we are young, popularity can feel permanent. The loudest voices seem powerful. The people who decide who belongs and who does not can appear to hold all the cards.
But time moves.
The things that make someone stand out as a child may later become their greatest strengths. Humour can become a way of connecting with people. Sensitivity can become empathy. Fear can coexist with courage. Stubbornness can become tenacity. Difference can become creativity. And the child who once struggled to find a place may eventually create a place of their own.
That is the idea behind A Fabulous Freak. Although it began with some of my own memories, I hope it works as a poem about being different for any young person who has ever felt overlooked, misunderstood or pressured to become someone they are not.
It is not a poem about waiting for other people to approve of you. It is about believing there is already something valuable in the Real You, even when others cannot yet see it.
I chose to write the poem as a pantoum, a poetic form in which lines repeat and return in new places. I liked the idea that the words themselves could change meaning as time moved forward through the poem, just as confidence, influence and power can change as we grow.
Enjoyed this poem? Discover more poems about difference, confidence, belonging and finding the courage to be yourself.
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