I WROTE this poem, I think, 15 years ago. It mirrors my break from the Left that started in the Philippines in the mid-1990s onto my grim experience with their comrades in New York City, which pushed me to move to Asheville NC in 2000 to seek “peace” and heal, and why I organized/produced “Bonfires for Peace” in public parks.

My response to newspaper interviews: “The Bonfires (for Peace) is not politics. This is a community convergence, whoever you are.” And then my frustration after covering the Occupy protest in Wall Street in 2011: “No leaders, no followers.” Today’s Left is fighting their own shadow, an enemy that is ushered by their “romanticized, idealized fear” of what may happen in a dystopian future, unable to see the horror in the gutters–ignoring the writings on the wall from Day 1 of the 21st century’s Great American Divide. Two dead in Minnesota blurring the dead in Ukraine, Gaza and Iran. And still, the Left believes the “war” is here, within and not without, far from our beloved “Democracy.” ☮️🗽☮️

Just So You Know

Just so you know

I am not coming to the party

I will not be in the drum circle

I won't be marching with the crowd

I will not be there. I am not going

I will not be present. I am gone.

The red wine that drenched beaten chests

in drunken celebration of our victories are all gone

spent, consumed, drained. The bottles broken

shards and splinters scattered on the pavement.

There's no more wine in the cellar of my searching.

The drums that I used to pound with strong hands

of coal and fire to usher thunders of rage among

bugles and brass have lost their rhythm.

I couldn't follow the beat anymore. My feet

and legs are worn out from all the marches

and hikes. Tired, blistered, bones twisted

my boots are punctured, with holes wide

as the hollow in my monsoon fed lungs. 

Just so you know. I won't be there.

But carry on and start the bonfire

without me. Let the heat surge

and illuminate the dusk of these

burning avenues and highways.

Dawn in the mountain reveals

columns of broken piano keys that

I couldn't follow. A drunken sky

of black pigeons splash in

the putrid waters but I couldn't

recognize them. The wolf's cry

that once woke me up from

stupor has a voice that I couldn't

understand. I couldn't hear the call

of crows or the tapping of ravens

anymore. Just so you know

I won't be there. You don't need me

in the next convergence to calm

the tempest that pummels the glade.

Just so you know why I am not

joining the din of jungles anymore.

I lost my armour along this journey.

Roads that once screamed the pain

time has covered my moss.

The bolsheviks of academias

and the revolutionaries on the rostrum

are drowned out by the discourse

in the plaza of our minds. The factory

is compressed in a tiny box and the farm

is littered with embers that click

out in midday sun. The songs

that warmed the trenches of Bastonne

aren't sung anymore. The wind

that pushed boats in Dunkirk

have gone elsewhere, and the poems

that lit the rubble of war from Waterloo

to Cajamarca, Yorktown to the Mekong Delta.

All gone.

The virulent force of my hands

that held torches on winter's nights

that I passed onto sweaty hands

of car workers in Macomb County

have fizzled out. The grease on gloves

of coalminers in Welch and steel

workers in Steelton are washed away

by invisible rains. Yet I can still recall

the cadence of lostness while young men

and women fight and die in Raqqa.

I can still smell the stench of dead camels

in oil fields in Riyadh. I hear the howl

of babies fed with toxic fear in Medellin

and Pyongyang. In my dreams

at night, I see electric eels along

the breakwaters in the South China Sea.

The foul aroma of gunpowder

in a Chicago sidestreet that devour

the scent of magnolias in the park.

The memories are still alive in me.

Skeletons of buffalos in Tahlequah

and murk of dumpsters, lost

keystones to violated treaties

in the plains and pueblos. Memories live.

But memories belong to the past.

Yet the agony remains unattended.

I want to come out and continue

the trek to freedom but I lost my way

as I lost my strength. I don't know how

to get to the plaza anymore. I am lost

in the far lefts of the north

and the alt rights of the west, and centers

of the east, and the left and right

of the south. I don't even know anymore

what kind of voice speaks of freedom

and justice. I will not be

welcomed to the gathering. I am misplaced.

I don't belong to anyone's polar extreme.

But those who go out early know

that there will be no dahlias that bloom and die:

they will all live yet mired in numbers and laws

in games of death, in loud anger.

Imprisoned in a shipwreck of blood.

I just couldn't navigate the plaza anymore.

So I will not be there.

Yet despite the fact that I lost my armour

my boots, my flag, my drums, my megaphone

my pen, my guitar, and my car and all the

tools that took me to the road, I still have one

last possession that I know will one day

bring us all together again.

My heart. ☮️🗽☮️

–Pasckie Pascua, from “Sweat! Poems of Grease and Mud.”