Lonely, lovely night

Rounding the corner,
jasmine suspended,
delicate and heavy -
one fears to break the atmosphere
with an offending breath.

Still I press one foot ahead of another,
head set on going home,
heart ruffling itself
like a bird too fat to fly
away into the darkness.

Still I slow my gait,
and my head looks up in spite of itself
at the glitter
a careless child strew in the dark velvet
that cloaks us by night.

And every night of every day of this week I find myself wondering, will this be the last night I will see the stars
from here.

Steaming the window pane with a sigh
on an early morning sleepless night
(it's still dark),
I promise myself I will return to this
place that I have grown to love.

forming a poem (it doesn't want to end)

verses hanging in the air
whirls of words waiting
to be strung together

so many beads on a string -
yet what do they matter
such very transient things
are these(that are
impossible to break apart
once they have been joined)

I feel them blowing
gently in my ear
as they coalesce: amalgamated
thought and feeling
inappropriate to express

so I will let them fill me
with abandonment for now,
before the prosiac world whisks
the wor[ds away -
a hazy memory of a lazy day
a secret happiness
a deeply buried sorrow
and to dance, dance, dance with no tomorrow...

I wish I were a useful person.

I wish I were more practical. All the stuff I enjoy doing are so useless, like dancing and music and drawing. Why can't I enjoy organising my life, or being knowledgeable about computers and cars and things?

Catch this if you can

Today I watched a really good movie. This past year or so I've watched a spate of movies, some good, some not so good, and some pretty darn good. But Doubt was really surprisingly good.

I suppose I should have anticipated it, with Meryl Streep acting in it. But the only reason why I watched it, at least at first, was because the person I was watching it with wanted to watch it. I mean, you'd think a movie about nuns and monks in the 1960s would have little relevance in today's context.

Yet the challenge of living a moral life is just the same for a person of the cloth as it is for a normal person, and the movie peels away those layers of the habit to reveal the humanity in both priest and straitlaced nun.

Beyond the good acting, the direction itself blew me away, and it was not just the motif of wind that did the trick. Although translating from a play to the screen might seem easy, the finesse of direction was palpable. Almost every scene was very deliberately and delicately orchestrated, without being cliched or overly arthouse or sentimental.

I won't belabour you with a bad pun on the movie's name, but I do encourage you to watch Doubt if you feel like a thought-provoking, aesthetically- and dramatically- satisfying movie, that's not in Chinese (the other movie to catch is Red Cliff).