Voukah [Voo-kah]; home

Leaf

In a world rich with foliage, dense with the smell of stirred earth and dampness, you could feel life as it stirs itself awake as it’s masked by the pianissimo cymbals of swaying leaves. All moves to the silent waltz of daybreak and gentle wind.

As life continues to stir, an aqueous humour surges through the veins of each leaf, siphoning what its twig and branch can bring. Colourless in the absence of light, but rich with life, each still mustering what is essential for preparing for the light. All could not exist without basking in gentle light, though only hoping that dawn does not bring a despotic shine. Prompt, almost garish, with its pedal protrusions from its core, sucking in moisture from nature with seemingly mammalian instinct. Veins so quintessential but minimalist, lacking anastomotic connections within its fabric, its life becomes so obliviously fragile and temporary. So fleeting, carried away in a breeze just barely more turbulent than its comfort.

All is not lost; identical contingencies surround each blade, rocking in similar directions with each gust, clattering the same sounds with turbulence, and siphoning at the same rate. Beautiful, but woefully mundane.

And yet, just a closer observation into one vestigial of a branch, and you could see what is rife with life, its struggles and its passions. What appears like a simple ebb and flow in its vessels, microscopically, is a flow so turbulent and strained that could rival a tumultuous storm. All of this as part of its way of sustaining its own fragility, for one day it will detach from its anchor and slowly wilt unceremoniously. Returning its own calamity to the stems and roots of its tree, continuing the cycle until the weight of the bark, branches and roots can no longer bare its own struggles. But until then, you’d wonder, what conscious appreciation there would be for where it is. Is this seen as a blessing? A curse? Or a neutral disregard as providence? At what point does a blossom understand the weight of its existence being a propagation of its ancestors? Or does that even happen at all? Is there remorse for the departing leaves, or for leaves that progressively siphon less in a jest for some unknown greater good?

Or does no one see past the greater foliage, in its monotonous uniformity, blissfully unaware of its complexities and its tribulations that, collectively, form only a minute part of an entire tree?

Flicker

Five hundred leagues under the sun, and you’ll feel the pressure on your skull. A weightless mass so heavy and coarse, the friability of human flesh eventually gives into its density. All the winds of change, of daily cares, of violent sounds within the murmuring. All the deafening silence and the clattering of teeth against nails. All this electrostatic tension that pulls the heart in multiple directions. Somehow, we all seem to walk happily wounded. I wonder if it is that we are truly feigning pain, or are truly blissfully unaware. Do meridians flow through us, or are we flowing on the forces of nature that shear – that burn, or that freeze?

I walked through a world so strangely foreign, but apparently mundane. A walk through a familiar creek, on a familiar path, and yet I still felt so detached and misplaced. I couldn’t help but feel so inhuman and removed from my surroundings, like a bishop in a game of checkers. Buds awakening from hibernation within both herculean trees and thin and dilapidated branches and the subtle flow and bubbling of water behind me. Streams that flow like calm fingers through a bed of marshmallow, slowly but surely gripping firm ground. People pass by me – or do they? I can’t tell if these pedestrians are truly random or simply a mirage. I don’t appear to exist to them, and I don’t feel alive when around them. Perhaps we live on different dimensions but perceive the same puzzle of life.

Tired, but invigorated. I’m in a world that is slowly fading away from my senses. A world that I barely feel. A world I don’t quite belong.

World

Ambivalence is the greatest blindness. In the humbling presence of luscious greens of trees and the sweet harmonious melodies of otherwise visceral tendencies, often the beauty ordained by nature becomes muted. A nihilistic shroud cannot help but desaturate the voracity of life as it exists, or as it presents.

Or, perhaps, is it the garish that steals the light from our eyes, or the cacophony that expires the last air from our ears? Perhaps it is this blindness, this deafness, from where phantasmagoria is birthed – is nurtured, is sated.

Then, the letters fall out of place, in a symphony of pitter-patter and fractals.

Boy of silence

“It’s not a boy!”

The stale smell of vinegar, isopropanol and blood ‘twixt the cataplexy of angry voices and sinister adulation could force blood out of any rational being’s mouth. Instead, there is chatter like a field of a thousand chicadas calling for predators.

“Why the hell would I lie about something like this?”

“This isn’t the first time you’ve been conniving. You’re the one trying to break our family apart!”

“Your family? As far as I’m concerned he’s my husband!”

“It doesn’t matter. You are never to taint our name with a heir!”

Being judged on a pedestal of a single layered mattress, legs agape, lucid from an epidural is truly a position any woman would like to be in. Or would one?

With a semi-violent jerk, a pair of wrinkled and work-torn hands pulled the duvet cocoon, welcoming decibels that’d accompany rattling of teeth from a whole room.

Soon, a deafening silence, drooped smiles like melting arsenic on magma, and a row of lemmings single file out the door into their little grotto.

I have since been the boy of silence.