Vagrant Verses, Serpentine Summers immediately introduces “a grimy side street of Bangkok” with enticing lyricism. The poet, Pasckie Pascua, invites the reader on a soulful journey but admonishes to “leave heavy baggage and unnecessary documents behind.” He investigates themes of love and loss and peace and politics. He plays many roles as a poet, a romantic, a philosopher, an activist, a mystic and a rock and roller. But “I don’t believe in love,” he writes disarmingly. “I believe in fire.”
Throughout the manuscript he writes with the intensity of a hot coal waiting for a breeze to ignite a flame. He smolders like ancient incense of sandalwood and cedar, his words mingle in a sweet smoky haze which spiral across each page and reveal a surprising strength and meditative melancholy. “I am both strange and familiar/I am recognizable like the wind/no shape, no color, no name,” he writes in a sage-like tone. On one page he blazes a tale of “a beautiful village muse with … sad eyes” and later he blasts fiery fury at “programmable hellos that strain… $10 phone card rituals.” He enjoys contrasts in the manner of love and hate being two sides to the same coin.
Like a Shaolin priest from a 1970’s television series, he drifts from one lonely horizon to another writing “I do not have a country.” Yet he finds solace in this wandering, “because all countries are mine.” For a moment you believe he could walk through walls and show places that cannot be seen and taste water that cannot be tasted as he transports you to his “village’s crystalline mountain brooks.” Rest beside the campfire of his words and hear his poems. Hold the book to your ears and let him tell you stories you haven’t heard. Stagger under the weight of Pasckie Pascua’s poetic trance.
These Vagrant Verses bleed from deep within him like his own blood. “I do not have a poem/because all poems are mine,” he writes in the fashion of an American Zen master. Vagrant Verses, Serpentine Summers burns with memorable lines but it is not merely black words on white paper. The collection of poetry exposes a window to the poet’s soul through the smoke signals he places along his journey’s path. He leaves words in place of footprints.
(c) Matthew Mulder. All rights reserved.
First published in the March 2005 issue of The Indie
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