Superficiality just kills here, from its concrete roots to its bamboo tips.

The nakedness of the city unravels as the MTR zips down the navel
Of its shorn planes, towards the exposed tip at the edge of the harbour.

There was a moment, a memento that served as mnemonic last night,
To the tempo of the cold drizzle of a Saturday December evening,
Between Tai Po Market and Kowloon Tong, where greatness was almost achieved on the shiny-steel-toy-Meccano cleanness of the East Rail MTR line, more streamlined Ikea than chaotic Kolkata, hurtling away from the border, where heavy brush and fused branches in thickets and high ranges draw thicker and denser and closer.

It passed, knowledge and fire and fields, stop by stop, as the engine hurtled towards its future, heedless of a hard-won past.

After the next alighting, the train and its predestined path sink back into the night, into the grinning artifice of the holiday lights.