Voukah [Voo-kah]; home

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.

Riverne

Wake up.

A room filled with cedar spirits and the ominous creaking of the walls. Nothing but a bed in the middle of this claustrophobic capsule that contains all your dreams. Even these thin walls can reflect your desires right back to your mind.

Open the door, and find an endless, dark drop. In front of you are weightless yet firm cobblestones of plank leading to nowhere in particular. A hop, skip and a jump and you could almost see a horizon. Or a drop to oblivion.

Invisible cities and lush rivernes littered in an endless sky. They too encapsulate everyone else’s dreams, and it seems only you decided to awaken so far.

Turn around, and your wooden prison dematerializes. A quick snap and a violent rain of lumber collapses into the abyss like misplaced dominoes.

There are all these islands of the mind, and still you stand there fixated on a drifting and barely visible vase on a distant riverne. Or that’s all you can perceive now. Somehow, you still smell the scent of carnations envelope your soul into a passionate tango. Or at least you think it does. At least you think that’s what carnations smell like. At least you think you see crumbling rocks chipping away at the riverne – any click of boulders or deforestation seems to pique your attention. Or at least you think it does.

Sueno

Do you recall the dreams of overgrowth, with vines of fushia embracing the cold stone pillar of a dilapidated temple, beneath your bare and pale toes?

Do you recall the nights dreaming of days atop a cliff, staring at an unending horizon of grey and yellow and purple watercolours splashed against the canvas of the sky, peering over a cliff of canopies and lush arbor?

Do you fathom the fading dreams of expressionless motions of walking through what was once a corridor into a courtyard of creeping foliage and overgrown roses, with the scent of decaying leaves and a earthly, metallic soil? The soft trickle from a quintessentially formed petrified trough from the early calm monsoons?

Do you ever long for that soft feeling of dissipation as you set yourself upon a marbled, crack-laden, unstable ground with legs like constricting twigs blocking an overpass, while you breathe slower, and slower, and slower?

Does it ever bother you that you forgot your dreams of walking through a spirit room in an abandoned chapel in the countryside with nothing more than a lexicon and a candle in your hands? The haunting, sinking feeling that there is something much greater than you that you will face alone, but you never found it and never fought anything to begin with?

Carnations

When the mere illusion of you disembowels everything I could possibly have – viscera, soul, thoughts, persona.

A simple carnation in a vase, harmless and quintessential. And absolutely unintrusive and indescript. Somehow its fragrance – its allure – is as enlighteningly modest as it is toxic. Addictive.

There is no antidote. There is no cure. There is no humane way of fitting between the cage. All there is left is to emasciate in a prison within a meadow, and watch longingly for just one dose. One little fucking dram. But there so much you know you cannot have. Forbidden. Sacriligious. Especially if this carnation is tended gingerly and meticulously.

You could open your mouth or flair your nostrils and there would be no way to avoid its charm. A stationary mesmer. An unproductive task with no perceivable reward.

All that you could never have.