fleur-de-lily

DRUNK POEM BEFORE GOING OUT

I’ve collected so many boys.

Texts and tables and toys.

Categorized, alphabetized,

always ready for another ride,

ready for another lie.

But they’re just for my display cabinet,

for me to look at, t

ake one down and go dancing sometime.

Truth is I only have one that gets to keep me close,

keeps me waking up all night.

I’ve been waiting up alright.

I always wanted a man that knows how to fly,

passport on your nightstand got more tats than mine.

And every night I spend with you is a new goodbye,

a different city every time.

And I swear that plane smell on your clothes gets me high.

And when you pick me up in your airport car

and have it drop us both off in your bed,

it’s like we’re driving through my airport heart

and winding up deep in my head.

I’ll never love you and you’ll never love me.

And when you’re gone, I;m going through my cabinet slowly.

Letting other men make me feel pretty.

But I won’t give anything away until you come back and hold me.

Tell me about your trip, your work, your roaming.

Tell me you missed me.

Tell me and kiss me. 

Tell me about work, your buildings, your paintings,

your pretty pictures, pretty films, and prettier pages.

And in return, I’ll wear all my pretty dresses

and all your favourite faces,

leather wrapped around my waist and

I want you in every space and

I want you in every grave.

I’ll keep you in the reflection of my sharp shaped sunglasses,

shadows on your cheek of my eyelashes.

And you don’t have to listen to what my past says

because all I have left of true love is ashes.

Don;t you wanna show me just what fast is?

Tell me it’s gonna be alright.

I’m ready for another lie.

Welcome back baby

I can be your china doll. Silk dress, soft hands, drawn-on eyes and painted lips, smooth hair that was custom made to be fanned out across your gray pillowcases. Suitcase on the floor, jetlag on your eyelids, me in your arms, wearing an invisible necklace of tiny perfume drops you brought back for me from Enfleurage.

This isn’t real. I can be your china doll, a statue you carved out of me, an idea of a girl you have in your head, like a figure cut out from your magazine pages, marble-white and scratched on the edges. My tongue; calcified bone. My mouth; sweet limestone. Sanded, worshipped, carved from rock. Kissing you until we don’t have to talk. Perfume bottle, travel treat, wrapped in tissue paper and laid like diamonds at my feet.

Sickening sweet, row of teeth. Fresh back from a city I buried six months apart. You may trace out my bones, like shapes from clay, but you’ll never find my heart. I can be your armless venus, powerless, I can be your china doll today. But I want you in every grave.

Nothing faster than a spring horse

Thank god the stars don’t judge us for what we do beneath them. Thank god the nights these days are getting shorter. My skin is already tar-black from your wandering wondering touch, scalded raw with the uncertainty of insincerity. Tell me how you really feel about me.

Imagine your soul in mine, reduced to grinds. In the morning I tell you my secrets; how I got here, how I died. Nevermind the ashes I leave on your palms, they are proof of how brightly I can burn. I will hold you while it gets warm outside. And you will let me lie in the width of your shoulders, between two seasons, carry me into twenty-two, springtime, and sunlight—they don’t know my sins.

You are hot and cold, like February, like March. Slow like springtime, sweeter than pink wine, heating up to me in the same way that the warmth of vodka makes my guts feel pretty. And the way you hold me at night is like a tree getting it’s leaves back, but the way you kiss me goodbye in the bright morning street is like a million lies. Each one special. Can’t help that my drunk monsters love your texts more than anyone else. You say I party too much, you say I run too fast. But the risk is all mine. Friday night when the gates come down, I’ve got all my bets on you. You’re the gun in my racetrack life. The days are getting warmer but you are hot and cold. Make me wait and watch while you run in a circle that comes back and back around to me. Never gonna let me win.

Nothing is a destination

Two thousand and twelve years were all made for me. Because 2012 is mine, all mine, all for me. I stopped writing my diaries and scribbles and loose leaf poems in January, my desk drawers are empty, because all of a sudden my life got too beautiful, far prettier than anyone’s sweet storybook words, even my own. Was it because of my internship? Was it because of coming back from Shanghai? Was it the money, the parties? Was it because of the friends I have made and found and rekindled and repainted in the images of my own ambitions, gorgeous messy girls with quick teeth who can pull off fedoras and sharp contrary men with creative jobs smoking clove cigarettes in their fabulously loveless apartments.

I think, in a way, it’s none of it. So I’m prepared to lose it all at the end of this week if I have to, and I’m fine, because really, in a way, it’s none of it at all. It’s not how well you’re living, but knowing how to live in the first place. And I’m fine without the magazine and the weekenders in Paris and the incredible incredible friends, old, young, old, new. I have found the carelessness afforded in understanding that everything you do happens for a reason—to lead you to something else, and then something else, and then something else still. I genuinely do want to move on because I don’t think this is where I’m meant to end up, I’m not the kind of girl who gets her job that way, with skin and lips and legs and lace, and besides I’m much more than just these pretty wallpaper things, I’m also development economics and politics of resistance and comparative sociology and internet culture and flesh and blood and bone and disaster and I swear one day I’ll print my own glossy fucking pages to hold all those things together because there is politics in aesthetics and artists in presidents and no one listens to me but they are closer than you know and everyone just thinks they’re the first to come up with something new but these so-called movements only happen in mirrors and connecting it all back together is the single highest, most salient, most relevant calling I can think of.

Besides maybe what I was meant to get there wasn’t a job but instead this man who opens me like I’m a book that he made with his name already printed inside. And all he knows is pretty things and parties and all I look like to him is pretty things and parties, and repeating outfits two days a row in the office is such a played out style on a young intern but who fucking cares because it’s the best secret I’ve ever kept, the best nights I’ve ever slept. I’m more than that job, and I don’t want it like this, and I’m happier still with the challenge of not knowing where I’m going, only that this place, this crazy eight weeks, this strange bed, was all somehow meant to send me there.

What a wild, wild, wild time it has been. 2012, stay mine until the end.

Wallpaperheart

I don’t know anymore, I don’t really know what I’m doing. There’s this internship that leads to a job upstairs at the magazine website for their recently launched Chinese edition that basically told me “We want you if no one better comes along” which is essentially what I used to tell boys in school who asked me to prom and I never did go with any of them so that can’t be good. And as for the Art Director, I can’t make myself use him as a professional contact, not when all I want him to do is kiss me again.

And to be honest, I have a lead and a contact somewhere else that I really want to work but I haven’t really heard from them this week either. Don’t know what I’m doing anymore. I spend all my time after work and weekends looking down martini glasses and beer bottles instead of looking down my future, wearing my selfish paper heart on the cut-out sleeves of my pretty clothes like it’s just a dirty, dirty stain. There’s always a party, always a party, everything’s always all a party. Everything I wanted, I have. The kind of life that would make your father cry. The kind of girl that will never die. Everything I wanted, I have. It’s only now I’m starting to think I wanted all the wrong, wrong things.

My excuse is that I’m young and I’m only getting older. Subtract my real age from the mileage on my speeding heart and let me just stay crazy, confused, beautiful twenty one forever.

What am I doing?

here is the night, one weekend ago
here are my shoulders, smooth like stones
here is your bookshelf, lined with the work I do
helsinki, marrakech, timbuktu

and here is your name
here is your name
here is your name
here is your mouth

telling the truth
into my mouth 

me too
I interviewed
for a place on your floor
here is the secret friday coffee
you wanted me for 

here you want me
do you want me here
the seventh floor
what am I doing 
I want you too but I want a job more 

Fuck fuck fuck fuck

I may have let something really stupid happen with the Art Director of my magazine.

YOUNGER PRETTIER SMARTER TALLER THINNER

Got AT LEAST four out of five on every other bitch you’ll ever meet.

I’m back in London and I’m feeling like a walking rap video of confidence with a boy in love with me on every single continent. Crazy bad jetlag, lying in bed all morning writing an article for the online mag my friend works on, wearing nothing but lace pants and eating marshmallow tea cakes. I AM the dream.

Missing from 1 to 4

It’s newly minted 2012 and I kissed a girl at midnight but by 1 I’m with a boy in an art studio in Soho, high up on the rooftop, and he’s making me drinks and painting my portrait, part German part Cantonese part curly hair and almond eyes part perfect, only one part. Because last years wishes are this year’s apologies, and Hong Kong feels like a combination of everything I love about the West and the Orient painted together like two different layers of a silk screen and I have nothing left to be sorry for. I feel like the heroine of an Eileen Chang story, mix blooded monolidded classic beauty in an embroidered cheongsam. Or a borrowed DvF dress with dangerous cut-outs riding over my hips.

“Where the fuck are you?” V babbles to me through the phone and suddenly it’s almost 4 on January the 1st, I shush her and respond in whispers so as not to wake my sleeping art professor, passed out on top of an unused canvas, with a traditional Chinese horsehair brush tucked behind his ear, flecks of gold ink all over his arms and to be honest I am a little rumpled and paint smeared myself, leaving him a note with a red oil pastel stick on a piece of thin tracing paper, my words look roguish and transparent. Come visit me in London, 以后再见. Love, L

Is it sleazy to leave without even saying goodbye? Not when all I let him do was kiss me and fall asleep in my arms. I prance back through the streets of Lan Kwai Fong, retracing drunken footsteps, toasting strangers, dancing through the crowds out on the streets, Happy New Year 干杯干杯！And I find T and V waiting for me at street food stall, with a paper bag wrapped bottle of Dom each, wobbly heads hovering over the most amazing Cantonese mango-ice I’ve ever seen; shaved ice, mango cubes, tapioca, and sweetened condensed milk. In delirious confusion, T confuses new years eve with Chinese new year and loudly wishes me a happy dragon year. I put on my sparkly 2012 glasses and order another bowl of mango-ice—a bigger one. Happy dragon year. And all I want for the new year, in that moment, is a Hong Kong sunrise.