Poetry
Untitled
I like old things
Clothing that’s hung in closets other than mine
Tarnished jewellery
Lovers who know what I’d order off a menu
Friends with whom to remember the past.
I like leather
I like oud
I like top notes that read of an oriental spice rack.
I like high thread count cotton
and silk
and linen and wool
I like ordering San Pellegrino
with a splash of lime and leaves of spearmint
In restaurants on the San Pellegrino
house plants
lofts
and high ceilings
I like Vietnamese noodle soups
bun rieu and bun bo hue
tea flavoured desserts
hojicha and jasmine and rose
I like hydrangea
always carrying the most weight
like that one person
in a first year group project
too, ranunculus, lavender
I like flying many hours to hold a lover
I like being held.
I like the colour green.
Mint green, forest green, pistachio.
My grandmother also likes the colour green.
I like wild salmon and halibut and purple rice and a simple salad of olive oil and lemon juice.
I like the plant and veggie balls from IKEA.
I like fall,
walking through its chilliness by myself in new cities of residence.
I like buying unique objects.
hand made ceramics.
Painting nude self portraits
singing in contralto.
dancing to sultry R&B
shaking my booty
a booty I’ve had to learn to shake,
Learn to love
I like powder days and blue bird days
I really really like Lululemon.
I like perfume, sophisticatedly blended
I like the one named after me, Lucedar Wood.
I like he who blended it.
I love him too.
I think I’ll like New York.
I think I’ll like Paris.
Even though I liked neither all the times I’ve been.
I really like Norway.
I really miss D.C.
Something draws me back to Hong Kong.
a gorgeous Norwegian lover,
A Rusty bit of heartache.
I like nude beaches
and jumping off masts
skinny dipping in the ocean
and making grown men tap.
I like men who pick up the phone when I call.
I don’t like men who do not respond to my texts.
I like men who give thoughtful gifts.
I like men with long hair and glasses.
I like men whose minds eclipse mine
though I’ve only found one so far.
I like women with short hair
who don’t wear any make up
though a little mascara doesn’t hurt,
you know who you are.
I like volumes and volumes of filled out journals and sketch books
medium nib Kaweco fountain pens
Ink wells
and wax seals.
Hand written letters,
love or otherwise.
Books, especially the ones with pencil marked prices on the top right corner
of the first page
Books that were a little slutty in their lifetimes,
rummaged by many
opened by more.
Philosophy.
Of Seneca and Aurelius and others I’m embarrassed to say I don’t know enough of.
Ruby Woo
Caberanet francs and spicy mezcal margaritas.
Especially the one made by Crybaby on Dundas,
A Pina Colada by Mother on Queen.
I like Toronto a lot
Somewhat begrudgingly.
I like being superstitious
Believing that every time I see a Harvard sweater or someone with locs it in fact means that you’ve been thinking of me.
I like celibacy
And sobriety
And being fiercely independent
Assembling IKEA furniture by myself even when the instructions have that X over the cute little figure assembling furniture by itself.
Being soft
when the occasion calls for it.
I like spider guard into lasso
It reminds me of pulling in a lover close with my leg
and jumping guillotines.
Too similar to excited embraces after a long period of apartedness.
I like spending hours in a museum
pondering scenes in paintings
I’m certain I’ve seen in a dream of mine.
Yves Tanguy
and Matisse
and Seurat
and Degas
and Kandinsky
and Monet.
I like mid century modern
And chairs from the Qing dynasty.
The lines of T.S. Elliot and Lu Xun and Ezra Pound
Vivaldi’s four seasons.
I like Peter Cat Recording Co.
and Khruangbin
and Polo and Pan,
the way I discovered them with my good friend Johanne at a Steve Jobs themed party
her dancing to their hypnotic beats in burgundy velvet
in a remodelled row home
in Columbia Heights,
pre-pandemic.
I still like all the friends I’ve lost
Love, even
Lovers still.
I like the way French sounds
And the way I sound in it.
I like frequenting restaurants owned by friends
And knowing that I’ve got at least 6 more loves left in me.
I like Chinatown produce
Sometimes it goes bad right after I buy it
But there’s something real about buying produce slightly past the peak of ripeness
And something wholly unnatural about buying green bananas already in body bags.
Untitled
My love is slutty
OPEN in neon red and neon blue
My love is easy
Liking 101, Infatuation 114
Prerequisites not required
No caviar, champagne bars, Michelin stars
Spend a day laying on the grass with her
let her rest her head on your thigh
She likes being horizontal
My love is naive
Or perhaps just forgetful
Perhaps intentionally disregards the consequences
Perhaps has a positivity bias
Throwing herself
At everyone, for anyone
As if she weren’t the most prized possession
Available to only the highest bidder.
No, she is like tissues,
Kleenex
A mundane offering to anyone and everyone who may need it
For you and you and you and you too.
Because I have plenty
and you have none.
I once loved a man who guarded his love
who doesn’t tell his friends he loves them.
But in my house I love yous dress my every windowsill
Adorn my every granite countertop
Line my every mantlepiece
Is free and abundant and profuse
like oxygen
like fallen leaves in autumn
like sun
in a desert
water
in the sea
Scarcity breeds value
and my love is worthless
is cheap
is branded green and yellow and Dollarama
is the stuff on the clearance rack of a suburban outlet Ross
is a Walmart love
A Great Value love
A made in China love
Give a little
Get a lot
Great Value, cheap, inferior, generic
[Oxy]moronoic
Great value for money
Give a little
Get a lot
Maybe love is like company
More the merrier
or perhaps diamonds
precious not because she is rare
but because she’s a controlled substance
Maybe people wouldn’t value love the way they do
if everyone’s love were like mine
Or perhaps simply I am a slut
Easy
Naive
Cheap
so my love had not in its destiny to be anything but
But I’d gladly be easy naive and cheap
To live a life filled with love
To rarely not be in love
To see love everywhere
in every corner of everyone
and everything
To love
To be love
To embrace love and be embraced by love
To live in a rose tinted world for most of one’s life
Maybe there’s nothing wrong with made in China
Maybe there are others like me
Who too do not guard their love
Who too offer it like Kleenex.
Maybe.
And maybe when I meet them
We will throw so much Kleenex at each other we become mummies
and never run out
despite all the crying for having found kin.
And we will live in a cushiony white embrace forever
Infinite Kleenex
That Which Cannot be Defined
I no longer chase it
for it is mine
I no longer define it
for it exceeds language
I no longer ponder it
for I have become it
It is no longer a question
for it has answered me
A glimpse at the force
larger than all of the multiverse
That birthed poetry literature and the arts
Perplexed the greatest minds
Millenia upon millennia
Through the rise and fall of empires and bloodlines
that which remains
that puzzles and entices and ruins
Imposters pretending to be
pretending to know
that which cannot be defined
that which is love
I yearn (for you)
I yearn (for you)
to appreciate the smouldering, electric pink edges of undulating clouds
between sunset and nightfall
the same cluster that exists
in every corner of the earth
To attempt but ultimately fail to fathom
the devastating beauty of this realm
For what are clouds
but the former abodes of mermaids and leviathans
reincarnated in its next life
as the first snowfall of 2002
crystals dancing on Crystal’s tongue?
I yearn to be on the perpetual odyssey
of unearthing the whole
and all
of you
the totality of your infinite complexities
To make love
and bare vulnerable
the very essence of each other
For what is love
but the homecoming
at last
of the missing half
Zeus took away from us?
To hold
and caress
to never misplace again
for the rest of eternity
I yearn to have a Sufjan Stevens record playing
while staring through each other’s
To see all of nothing
of everything
in the geometry of your iris
To understand
at last
the meaning of infinite
for its marker exists in our interstellar
universal-through-every-timeline
innate-in-our-dna
yearning for each other
For what good is modernity
if not for instantaneous access to art with the ability to transport?
To remind us of dear moments
shuffled away in time
if only through the shade closest
to International Klein Blue
the salvageable notes
of Romance Oubliee
if only in spirit, through memory?
I yearn to be understood
To be bitten
on unfamiliar places on my body yet recognize
the familiarity of your breath
a scent I’ll know as yours
in every single life time
For what is synchronicity
but a symphony of accidental melodies delivering a most profound harmony?
but starting
ending
finishing
post noting
each other’s every other sentence?
I yearn for the dusk of a love
which never sets
cradled between the sun and the moon
which finds its way back to us
time and time
and
time
again
in a thermopolium in Pompeii
in Atlantis with the sirens
in mid century Connecticut
between the Midlevel Elevators
in British Hong Kong
soon
, god
damnit!
in post apocalyptic Tokyo
in galactic colony 352…
for why do I reach the night so cautiously
if not for the fear of never seeing
you again?
“The number you have reached is not in service”
The night I met my first love
I called whom I thought
was my first love
44 times.
But I couldn’t remember his number
So the calls never went through.
Untitled
“I’m sad you’re leaving.”
“Don’t worry,
It’ll only be for a little bit
Just as 21 years
And 22 years
Were but only
A little bit.”
Things in your new room
A mattress without a frame
Amazon shipping boxes
books stacked on the floor
a Georgetown student card
two closets
the same IKEA lamp shelf as the one in our old room
medical records faced down (which I peaked at)
(which I wasn’t supposed to peak at)
the wallet I got you that one Christmas you said you’d lost
clothes I recognized
clothes I didn’t recognize
my old sweater that always fit you better than it fit me
no soap, no toilet paper, no (clean) towel
the new laptop you bought after I flung your old one off a balcony
The night I slept over you clung on to me like I was still your family. And we rode an Uber to your work and spoke like we were still parts of each other.