… shoulder to shoulder in the crowd, venturing underground, toward the Mongkok MTR … moving as one both in and out, a swirling whorl bifurcating as we are sifted through the turnstiles … mobile electronic devices … shopping bags and designer labels … phone-photo-flash … shoved right up tight, side by side, sucked into carriages, face to face and back to back, stainless steel, glass and breath … hot … whisked out and up at Central … onto a conveyor-belt double-decker tram ride … to find long compressed alley-ways upwards of red and gold decorations … someone did mention the coming of the Chinese New Year … yes, yes, yes, the Year of the Rabbit … another gift for … for good fortune … and yet all I can think of … all I can see … all I can hear … all I can smell … all I can taste and touch is … the material … the fabric … the flippy-floppy melt into other bodies … metropolis or necropolis? … 40/50 stories adjacent … viewed that close … it is only a curtain, a certain way, to screen and separate … internalised … extricated … yet inscribed without looking … the bright kaleidoscopic neon lights are turned on … the diurnal distraction of the multitude … 12th storey hotel room … morning once again … grey winter light … the breakfast room … out of the window … last night’s rubbish removed on carts … empty boxes flattened … the cardboard recycled on street corners … the teachers waiting for late pupils at the school-gate … finger-wagging, rumpled uniforms … a steady running stream of one-by-one/two-by-two/three-by three and so-forth and into past-tense …the bilingual world of the uncovered, recovered, reconstructed, and reconstituted … begin again … for a moment … in thought … a time where … of a space … whence … a place … wherewithal … – Aleks Danko 2011