Voukah [Voo-kah]; home

A world

Perhaps I’ll find a world where water flows upwards.

Perhaps I’ll find a world where beings hop from cloud-to-cloud to find home.

Perhaps I’ll find a world where soil is effervescent and the ceilings of our homes are made of wool, arabesque textiles and ice foundations.

Perhaps I’ll find a world with such uneven grounding that falling is just a routine, mundane feat. It’d just be a simple quirk that all common spirits share.

A world, perhaps, I would belong in.

A world so preoccupied with the drifting winds and scattered, harmless rain that companionship was never a requirement. A burden. An artifact.

A world so complex, romantic quarrels and infidelity would be so trivial and unequivocal to the changing tides. A world so gloriously inefficient that hunger was not an isolated problem – everyone would sympathize with starvation and drought. A world where self-evisceration isn’t seized as an opportunity to advance someone’s political and social stature. No wishing you could have done something. No wishing you had said what you wanted to. No bullshit wishing in a bullshit memorial.

Would such a world in such disarray be a world in calamitous peace? A way of unity? The birth of a eschatological world?

Would this be a world where you lived, or a world you died?

Ritualist

There are

days

when you could just materialize

WINGS

and other

days

when you feel the

WEIGHT

from your

head

pull you to the

CORE

of the world.

Regardless of where you go

you can still feel your

TOES

singe from the

FLAMES

of hell.

No amount of antidote can

bring you anywhere

NEAR

the oblivion you seek.

The feeling of

NOTHING.

The feeling that you can no longer care

and

the feeling of singularity.

An

ABERRATION

that disappears with time.

Let

me

go

HOME.

Throne of skeletons

A vast, vague, vexatious mist of war. Remnants of a listless civil war of insurmountable regret and chagrin. None of this makes any sense.

But you fight. You fight for a causeless cause. You fight because you have been told to. The weapons you were given will make widows, but there are no opponents except yourself. You cannot widow yourself; you have no one to mourn for but yourself

Petty qualms. A wave of ashes swirl in between your fingers like a acrobats performing a technical routine. All of this is routine to the human psyche.

Sitting on your makeshift throne of skeletons you have created. Once-flesh beings of nature incinerated by passion; incinerated by lust; incinerated by wrath. The fullness – the plumpness and silkiness – of skin is only a mirage, for you, too, will emaciate yourself from the lack of nourishment. The lack of psychological invigoration. The lack of sanity.

Reminders of beautiful flora: hydrangeas, lotuses, epiphylla, vanilla and cherry blossoms. One moment of exhale and they will finally wisp away from your consciousness. You’ve held your breath this long, ruminating about the feeling of petals – so succulent you could feel them sink in your teeth once more.

Take a deep breath. Don’t need to blow down the little piggies’ houses. Just let it all go.

A woeful dance of ashes as they waltz into evanescence. A last vial of tears. They’re all gone.

This wildfire you’ve created is a blasphemy. A sacriligous desire. The end of your asceticism.

So bare your red robe so you may once again feel light against gravity of the world. And let the throne you created dissolve into oblivion as you raise yourself out of your seat.

For after every wildfire, flowers shall bloom.

Light may never come back to you, so compress it, conserve it and live by it.

I live in a time when penicillin still works.

I live in a time when only one of two locks is still sufficient.

I live in a time when only half of us are tolerant of the other half.

I live in a place that allows you to homogenize in a melange of people in plebian and business attire.

I live in a time when rules are placed but are unevenly enforced.

I live in an era of imperfect transitions. Fragments piecing together like solving a puzzle of bloodstained glass after a cracked skull of an unfortunate unmarriage. In the name of what god, exactly?

A taste of milk and honey. Synthetic honey, no less, dusted with arsenic and sodium chloride. Die sweetly, you’d be told. Rows of paraffin impaled upon a chalice. A night of desire, or a night of mourn? A relic of the past, or a necessity? A contingency, perhaps.

A pen is only mightier than a sword if you’ve left your sword to dull. And if you devote your faith to your mind instead of another’s.

Petroleum. A sweet bitterness. A smell of death. We take pleasure in vapourizing the dead and profit from it. “Economics” is the common excuse. But could we be bartering our time to be appeased?

Nausea. Close your eyes to adjust. Open, and the sky turns pallor. Darker. Keep your eyes pried. Peeled. Don’t blink.

I live in a time when time can no longer live.