jack-of-all-trades

One writer's attempt to cope with the human experience.

[poorlycommunicated]

Day 8: 04/11/26

occaisionally hedonism is learning the ways of cleaning up after

tonight, I learn cold salt water removes blood proteins from white cloth

I giggle when the marks got given

And now write down how to pack my bags proper for the weekend

I will be exhausted when I make it home and I fear I am going to forget how to pack my bag

Stacking the Dionysian party before an escape away, what a move.

But I got to taste the fruit,

I got to bruise like a joyful peach

And tomorrow I will hear the cold salt water of the ocean,

And decide not to curse my white dress being a touch stained

I know how to clean it

[poorlycommunicated]

Day 7: 03/25/26

Red. Blue.

Stay or go. Ignorance or no.

Classic sci-fi stereotype, but written by an uncracked egg loudest.

When I see the TV glowing I wonder how much brighter can it possibly get?

And why I cannot be satisfied, or at least surefooted enough to choose what’s next.

I cannot choose ignorance,

It goes against everything I stand for.

There is no longer any bliss in not knowingz

[poorlycommunicated]

Day 6: 03/14/26

The perfume on the high shelf is pointless, even if you do find the perfect occasion to wear it to

Today is your occasion to use it.

Don’t you want to entice as you walk, leaving floral peppery curls of colors behind you? Maybe that perfect green scent of broken leaves and fresh rain?

Savoring and saving have the unfortunate sharing of letters, and I fear that many have mistaken them for each other.

One of these meals may very well be your last my friends, if you have a want, an aching tooth and drooling mouth in your soul, shouldn’t you go for seconds?

You know the difference between _want_ and boredom, gluttony has been made into such a villain that the common man refuses to indulge.

Linger in sunbeams, kiss your wife and your boyfriend a thousand times before making it out the door if the spirit moves you.

There is no better time to start that art project you little inner-child denying freak I swear to God you will never regret starting.

Want beyond your limits, and you will know when to stop I swear it.

Stop stopping early.

Want is a finished meal and a dessert, want is unlocking the door before you and stepping through,

Life is too short and too precious to live in the doorframe.

Please push, into that next desire.

Let my lovely little life become hickies, bruised knees, swimming naked under full skies of stars and moon, singing loud bad and wrong,

Let me never shirk the responsibility to myself to keep reading and witnessing and making, and meeting you every step of the way.

Oh the soul is kindling oh it LONGS to be a tower of firefly light scorching high to the heavens, why would you deny it that?

The occasion for the good dress is the fact that you’re alive,

And that is divine.

[poorlycommunicated]

Day 5: 03/04/26

Lately, I have been thinking of my grandfather. The one on my mother’s side. My mother whose biggest form of rebellion was paying for her own college, going folk dancing, and becoming a vegetarian. My grandfather was a republican, a conservative, and I hear, kind of crazy. I didn’t know any of this growing up of course, and he never knew I was going to be someone he hated before he passed away. I grew into my transness much much later. But my mother, my watershedecologist environmentalist mother, sometimes talks about him. Never fondly, he’s a man, so she never speaks fondly. But occasionally she tosses off comments like they are nothing. Through this I have found out we could have had family money, but he wasted it in stocks. He was stingy with her hobby money, so she paid for everything I ever wanted to try growing up. And he thought, this one is the kicker, he thought that everyone in the workd was out to get him personally. She threw that out causually in the car one day. I have not been able to shake it. I have a level of paranoia. Not debilitating, but it’s there. And I think about it a lot. It’s the belief my brain has that someone is going to swing on me, suckerpunch me in the back of the head. And the belief that my lover when I cannot see him head into the next hospital room, that surely he is going to die. It’s the needling mosquito bites of ifs and ands and I cannot seem to shake the thought now that maybe this is my family right, my blood. I always thought I had grown this on my own, but maybe the one family property my grandfather passed on was the funhouse mirror mind.

[poorlycommunicated]

Day 4: 03/02/26

Whne I pray at your altar, and bruise my knees, I think how often I take the bruising to be holy i my writing. But that’s because to me it is, to me it is. I cannot help but write it again when I lay my head in your lap. There is diffusing morning light to filter into the scene, while you pat my hair so peacefully. Not always gently but always peacefully to me. And I try to show you true devotion. I keep thinking about an “aptitude for devotion,” and think on how wrong people have the concept of devotion. It isn’t singular, nothing in life to me feels singular, but it is powerful. It is the act of wrapping our red string of fate firmly around my fists, my waist, my tongue; and offering the ends to you. It is the truth of how clear you make my mind, the blessings I recieve in return. It is you taking my prayers on faith that I wish to be at your altar, it is the feel of your metal gracing my shoulders and deigning me ready to go fight go protect on your behalf, it is the devotional behavior of a man bewitched but not bewildered laying here in the sun. I lay down my sword and shield at your feet, and I will find true peace here against your thighs. Let my knees suffer the damages I am finally still.

[poorlycommunicated]

Day 3 EXTRA: 02/27/26

when I feel like I am peering around every little nook and cranny to find where she is hiding, I find evidence of her everywhere. I feel like I see old diaries and journals open and half finished, I see lingering bits of projects unfinished. I see a girl covered in paint and pastels in a reflection before she disappears. I am, different now. A boy, first and foremost. But this girl still lives in my soul and I do not know what that says about me. I compare myself to a matryoshka doll in my poetry and I wish I could be one or the other some days so my mother might be happy or unhappy with me instead of in between. But thats how it goes I guess when it comes to knowing yourself, you cannot step in the same river even once.

[poorlycommunicated]

Day 3: 02/27/26

[A flash of something, brilliant lightning, or some brilliant high-speed advertising, backlights our hero]

???: Hm, fuck.

[another flash, sillohuetting our now leaning over hero looking at something on the ground]

[a thud is heard]

???: _damnit_. I really hate advertising.

[cue subtle guitar riff to backdrop our pseudo Juno Steel]

???: Just like the luck of this broken down end of town. No light for miles except the occasional flashes of heat mightning advertising, burning bright white, and I mean blue white scary, smiles into your retinas before you can even turn your head to avoid buying the newest latest greatest sucker you in toothpaste. And I could not feel more at home, more because of being face down on the pavement again—

[another ad flash]

— than because of where I am.

[poorlycommunicated]

Day 2: 02/26/26

somewhere along the past year, maybe beginning in the new year, maybe starting three years ago

I fear that hope somehow started rotting inside of me,

Not completely because sunlight still touches my days!

But a piece of hope, has rotted.

I can tell, its eating up the good around it, and its mycellium is spreading

I begin to bite more like a dying dog.

Failing to spot the horizon catching up to me and forgetting to rest, take space, and at my core: be brave.

Which is the point here, I cannot be a coward. I can be controversial, I can be mistakenly cruel, I can make mistakes,

But I had sworn now six years ago,

That I liked myself. Which meant no more stepping on myself for the sake of acceptability, not shirking responsibility but instead taking a part in my own revelry purposefully.

And it has started to rot.

How do I kickstart rebirth without another near death experience I got four years ago? How do I find life without global calamity insisting I must?

I don’t know. I owe it to myself to find out though.

Especially now that I have noticed the rot.

[poorlycommunicated]

Day 1: 02/25/26

…I think it is odd that I stopped writing with consistency

right on the edge of breaking open.

There are so many stories I wished to capture,

so many open thoughts/collections/explorations I should have had here

all here to be the ley lines to memory.

Any documentation, written at least,

to the fresh helled discoveries and changes from the last 4 years

would have been so helpful

right about now.

I’m looking for answers and I am worried

I passed my self on the road too long past to really remember what advice I gave.

Now I will never quite know, how I found the footing last time.

Welcome back, I guess.

[poorlycommunicated]

I feel like I’m trying to know a face I have never seen before,

The shapes keep moving.

How can you be fallen from grace if you never knew grace was there?

I am asking honestly.

Because I am struck by prayer, and my soul is filled with broken stained glass windows,

Prayer that the everyday heavens never leave me.

I am on my knees, I am standing,

_I am on my knees_.

No one died for my sins, or for my suffering,

And the wine and dancing never stops.

I swear that my altars are between my lovers lips and legs, and in the morning sunlight in the woods,

The heartbeat of the music.

But every time I pray it feels like defiance.

I feel like some God’s least favorite son,

And like an absent father I do not know his face.

And like an absent father I cannot feel his grace.

[poorlycommunicated]

1.

There’s something really appealing about starting my villain arc these days

Of course the clothing looks so attractive

And all the best villains are queer coded anyways

Lord knows following a hero whose pronouns kept changing, would just get too confusing.

It would be too much!

And I am great at being too much.

I could be a villain you catch monologing on and on about something they find interesting,

And you would laugh

Because I would have forgotten what the plan was by the time I was finished talking

And the leaky apartment walls, and the plethora of back acne like a field of stars

Would just be a part of the look

A skin picking hero? Questionable.

But a villain who can’t quite keep their nails off themselves? Very doable.

I cry too, very easily.

Every emotion is grand and sweeping, constantly functioning at a ten.

You give me such shit for it.

And with a reputation, I might never have to put up with anyone’s shit again.

I think that’s why my brother maintains his reputation.

And I could buy my all my loves the things that they deserve, if I only took back from the rich a little

All the houses, and surgeries, and gardens, and foods that anyone could want!

I would still be working for this money of course

With the plots and the plans

But I wiuld be my only boss.

Being the villain means I would get to rest, and take days off

It would let me be selfish with my time, with my energy

I would be allowed to survive, and not thrive on days too hard to think

And thrive, not just survive, on days I can be my best.

I would be allowed to have all these things with no need for explanation.

I would get to savor my life of selfish free time

Selfish love of my chatter and my acne and my shitty little apartment

Selfish

Selfish

Self fucking adoration.

A villain who treats themselves to the good things of the world,

I would be the only god I pay tribute to.

I mean, fuck man

We are all getting screwed over anyways right?

Might as well get to sleep in too.

[poorlycommunicated]

you dont even know you broke my heart and thats so much worse. because its not a secret. its not a fucking secret. i would have told you myself if you let me. you are one of a growing number, where I am the only common denominator. is it my fault? do i have a face that says abandon me? lie to me? manipulate and use me? forget me? i wish i knew what it is you all see in me, so i could finally change it.

[poorlycommunicated]

Today I played Super Smash Bros Melee with friends, for hours.

And brought me a smile, because it felt like you.

And it felt like home until he takes a call from a girl who doesn’t know we’re competing

The one he chose to take a chance on, after saying I was a possibility.

After raising my hopes, she doesn’t know he crushed me with her as his hammer.

He plays your character, Marth, in white.

Final Destination.

And it feels like you.

It feels like I am you, in some sick retribution.

Almost laughable.

I try so hard not to be you, not to feel your sigh in my skin,

I wanna be a better man than you were.

I want to be kind.

I realize now how hard it is.

But I have to be better.

I have to be _better_.

[poorlycommunicated]

Like a mass of sickly sweet bubble gum,

I am cutting you out of my hair.

“I am such a straight guy, just the way your hair covers your tits, and how your hips move,”

I am cutting you out.

No treasuring what you have rotted before my very eyes,

And no living in the knots your confession tangled into my unkempt unwashed unhappy bedhead.

I kept the hair for you,

I wanna feel like me again.

[poorlycommunicated]

I am so much stronger than I have been,

And much stronger than I give myself credit for.

But could the universe maybe space this shit out a bit more?

[poorlycommunicated]

My heart lifts above me in the dark

Pulsating.

I want to be there.

I want to be out in the living room, on zoom, with my friends.

But I am so tired and so dead.

I am so tired,

I am so dead.

My partner is on that zoom call, my friends are there.

But our friend who didn’t/doesn’t treat me right is there.

I am too emotionally buried to put that smile on for them all.

Why don’t people treat me right?

I have done everything right, I put in the work, I am emotionally vunerable, communicative , and available.

So why don’t people treat me the way I should be loved?

My partner does, and if he can do it, then it should be possible.

Why do they lie to me? Why do people manipulate me? I am doing it right I think, but is it me?

I’m the common denominator.

[poorlycommunicated]

I cannot believe he lied to me, that he fucking lied to me, that he fucking lied to me AGAIN. Disingenuous is the word he used.

To him, I was a favor, a checklist item, a girl to be protected because she’s too fragile to be rejected or something like that.

He never wanted me. He never wanted me. He never wanted me.

I only wanted him.

And he lied.

I let him crawl inside my body because I thought he wanted me.

I may be free with my love and how I share it, but it is still fucking SACRED. Because I ONLY EVER want to give it to those who want me. Who want me.

I am not to be pitied.

He used me against himself, against myself.

He has poisoned the memory.

I am unclean.

I am, unclean.

And I told him I still wanted to be friends because I didn’t want to lose him.

And I told him,

I am going to finish your painting.

I want him to have wanted me.

I want him to never fucking touch me again.

Twice. TWICE. THIS was the SECOND TIME.

And I cannot breathe.