POETRILITIC

When Politics Meet Poetry

Artwork by: Shain Parwiz

Dear Readers and Subscribers,

Welcome to a different kind of front line.
This isn’t just commentary—it’s a conversation.
On one side, Shain,

Shain Parwiz

the poetic dreamer who bleeds ink and fire.
On the other, Jerry,

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the relentless analyst with a sharp eye on strategy and statecraft.
Together they spar, they provoke, they illuminate, weaving dream and realpolitik into something deeper than both.

The result? A dialogue that cuts through the noise and reminds us that the world is never as simple as headlines suggest

SHAIN:

I don't know what's harder to swallow, the bullets or the breadcrumbs.

Aid as ambush.

Hunger as crosshair.

Civilians pulled like magnets toward hope,

only to be mowed down by mechanized mercy.

They call it humanitarian,

but I see the hounds behind the handouts,

drones dressed as doves, tanks perched behind rice sacks,

safety net spun into snare.

GHF?

A euphemism with blood in its teeth.

Gaza bleeds.

The world swipes past genocide like a sponsored ad.

I'm tired of translating carnage into caution.

I'm not here for diplomacy.

I'm here because children fought tanks with their hunger,

because mothers became shields,

because fathers dug graves instead of wells,

because sisters bled into the soil

while the world still asked them, all of them,

to stay calm.

And I ask:

Are we lost

or are we truly dead inside?

I refuse.

Refuse.

Refuse

to believe this is truth.

JERRY:

Meanwhile, in a not-too-far-away part of the world…

ISRAEL–IRAN: THE GATHERING PRESSURE

Israel strikes again… in Syria. Iranian operatives eliminated, Hezbollah arms destroyed; precise, deliberate, and public. Each strike a message: We control the air. We set the rules.

Iran absorbs the blows. No open retaliation, not yet. Instead, the long war of proxies continues. Hezbollah's arsenal expands in Lebanon, the Houthis disrupt shipping in the Red Sea, militias probe U.S. forces in Iraq and Syria. Tehran’s patience is tactical.

In Gaza, hope turns lethal. Food convoys become killing zones. Desperate crowds crushed under their own hunger, shot at as they scramble for survival. Aid has become a weaponized spectacle, streamed in real time and quickly forgotten by the world.

The United States reinforces its presence, warships positioned as both shield and threat. Russia and China remain silent — their strength grows as Washington’s credibility erodes in the blood-soaked sands.

Diplomatic channels remain open, but increasingly hollow. The region holds its breath, knowing that one miscalculation could ignite what no one truly controls anymore.

SHAIN:

You say Israel strikes again.

I… I’m struggling to make it make sense.

I dare say, the sky doesn’t belong to God anymore.

Not here.

Not after what we’ve seen.

You list Iranian deaths

like… groceries. Inconsequential.

Checked off. Logged. Done.

But every name—

had a heartbeat.

A mother. A figure of love.

Someone still setting the table

for a son already turned to dust.

Blood doesn’t clean easy.

You think it does.

It stays.

Under the nails,

in the cracks of the floor,

in the air.

"We control the air."

That’s not power.

That’s tyranny.

No—

that’s arrogance on autopilot.

And the air?

It breathes.

It lives.

It remembers.

Holds screams louder than any radar.

You say Iran absorbs the blows.

Absorbs?

Like water?

A sponge?

A damned piece of tissue?

Like it’s nothing.

You’d like that, wouldn’t you?

No accountability.

What about the kids in Beirut?

Doing homework

between sirens.

Flinching at fireworks

because they sound too much

like what came before. PTSD in baby teeth.

You call it a long war of proxies.

I call it cowardice.

Blatant.

Chess played with children.

Not soldiers—

children.

No kings fall.

Just pawns.

Always pawns.

You mention Hezbollah’s arsenal.

I see shadows on walls

that shouldn’t exist.

I hear ghosts

who never got the chance

to grow up.

You say the Houthis disrupt shipping.

There’s a fisherman,

somewhere—

counting loss in empty nets,

not barrels.

His hands stink of salt and grief

and a war

he never asked to carry.

Oh wow—Tehran’s patience is tactical.

But so is grief.

You ever think of that?

Didn’t think so.

Pain that knows how to sit still.

How to wait.

How to nest in the bones of a man stoic and trying to stay sane,

who wakes every morning

hoping for a knock

that never comes.

For a son

that never crossed the border alive.

Your warships float.

You call them shield and threat.

I call that a contradiction.

A joke.

Because what do they protect

when the people you claim to save

can’t even reach a bag of flour?

So yeah—Russia and China are silent.

But louder still?

The silence in New York.

In London.

Deafening deals signed in rooms

where the cost bleeds out

somewhere else.

You dare speak of miscalculations.

As if this was a mistake.

As if we’re that stupid.

No—this is design.

Slow-burning.

Deliberate.

Signed.

Sealed.

Packaged as policy.

You don’t fool me.

Let alone us.

I don’t want your bulletins.

You speak from both sides of your mouth.

I want truth.

Raw, dirty, unfiltered.

The kind that doesn’t fit

your format.

Your narrative.

Your delusional reality.

I want information that bleeds at the edges

and doesn’t need your permission to exist.

You read the news.

I bury it.

And still—

I write.

Wild-eyed.

Furious.

Because someone has to.

JERRY:

And while Gaza starves beneath the whine of drones and the false promise of aid,

another game unfolds—quieter, but no less lethal.

Iran plays the long arc, eyes fixed on the balance sheet of blood.

They bury their dead in Damascus, nod to their martyrs, and tighten the chessboard.

Hezbollah inches closer to the border. The Houthis don’t flinch.

The Red Sea boils in silence—commerce rerouted, warnings issued, nothing resolved.

Israel moves with impunity—missiles by night, denials by day.

Every strike on Syria another line crossed,

another provocation beneath the threshold of open war.

But thresholds are illusions in this kind of war.

America watches from its floating fortresses.

Two carrier groups off the coast, a trillion-dollar armada

meant to project peace through the barrel of readiness.

Yet for all that firepower,

not a single grain of rice has been protected.

Talks continue. In Geneva. In Cairo. In headlines.

But nobody believes the words anymore—

not when diplomacy comes dressed in camouflage

and treaties are rewritten in shrapnel.

This isn’t just a clash of nations.

It’s a slow unthreading of the world order—

and the children in Rafah,

the mothers in Tyre,

the fighters in Deir ez-Zor — they are the footnotes

in the final chapter of someone else’s empire.

SHAIN:

You talk like the war's a whiteboard.

markers, strategies, thresholds.

I'm just….Arrgh…. I’m screaming blue murder,

We’re still brushing dust out of a baby’s eyelashes.

You call it “balance sheets”

But tell me who counts in blood?

Who…..Who makes profit off pulse?

Strategy? nah, it’s stalling……

A kind of slow bleed that doesn’t show up on the news.

a waiting room with no walls

and no one comes out.

This isn’t chess.

don’t say chess.

No kings here,

no bishops.

just a boy with a plastic spoon digging his sister out of stone.

and yeah,

he knew her name.

not a number. a name.

You say red sea boils?

we say the pots are empty.

they been empty.

and still

she ties her daughter’s hair

even when her hands won’t stop shaking

from yesterday’s burial.

You call it silence.

Hell no, we call it as it is, scars.

old, unearned, and undeserved scars.

Deep ones that

still aches when it rains.

Damned missiles by midnight.

denials before breakfast.

Precision? You have got to be kidding.

tell that to the father carrying limbs

desperately to keep himself sane

because that kid? He was the only one he had.

Thresholds?

we crossed them.

Barefooted and dirty faced.

before anyone called it a war.

Floating fortresses?

what do you guard—

except shame?

except silence?

That is something I call Death From Above

Two ships,

thousands of tons.

Yet not a single crumb makes it through.

but hey—power projection, right?

Talks in Geneva.

Talks in Cairo.

Round and round it goes,

while we bury names in rows.

This isn't unraveling,

this is what it's always been.

you just didn’t care to even look between your bloodstained fingers.

And us? nothing,

not footnotes.

not extras in your empire’s epilogue.

We’re merely the echo.

the grain that got through and ignored.

This is a verse you can’t drone away,

the lines you thought you erased

but keeps writing itself in the smoke.

Yes, I am angry and indignant,

When videos show absolute destruction.

I am also sad, my grief extends beyond screens

And you know why?

Because I have something,

That you can’t take from me,

Humanity. Look it up.

You may learn something.

But again without a soul,

You never will.

JERRY:

You speak of humanity.

Noble. Necessary. But dangerously absent from the conference rooms I follow.

See, I don’t deal in tears. I track trajectories.

I don’t write eulogies. I write what the men in suits whisper when the cameras stop rolling.

Geneva? Theater.

Cairo? Diversion.

Brussels? A roundtable of sanitized euphemisms where every resolution is a sedative,

and every delay is deliberate.

They don’t need peace. They need pause.

A ceasefire long enough to reload, reshuffle alliances,

and massage the narrative for the next funding round.

Meanwhile, Tel Aviv keeps the tempo.

One eye on Tehran, the other on CNN.

They’ve mastered the art of “plausible provocation.”

Hit just enough to invite a reaction,

but not enough to invite accountability.

Iran?

Patient, yes. But not passive.

They're not waiting for justice — they're waiting for overreach.

Waiting for the West to slip on its own hubris.

It always does.

And as the region burns, Washington positions —

not to help, not to heal — but to hedge.

They deploy carriers like press releases,

sanction oxygen, and call it strategy.

Because nothing says “commitment to peace”

like F-35s and frozen assets.

Russia watches —

not with pity, but with popcorn.

China smiles —

not with empathy, but with a pen,

signing trade deals while the West loses the moral high ground

like loose change falling through frayed pockets.

And you want truth?

Here it is:

No one’s coming.

Not for Gaza. Not for Rafah. Not for the child with half a family.

Because in the grand ledger of geopolitics,

suffering is a footnote —

unless it can be monetized, televised, or weaponized.

So yes, write. Scream.

Sling your verses at the sky.

But understand —

the board is fixed.

The dice are loaded.

And history isn’t written by the loudest,

but by the last one left standing.

And I?

I’m not here to feel.

I’m here to document the decay —

one briefing at a time.

SHAIN:

Then what moves you?

What wakes you?

What breaks through that armor,

you mistake for clarity?

Geneva’s theater, you say.

But Gaza is the stage.

No curtains. No scripts.

Only smoke.

Only screams.

Only a child coughing

through crumbled concrete

while the crowd scrolls past

like it’s part of the performance.

You track trajectories.

I track last breaths.

You speak of strategy.

I speak of Samir.

He died holding his schoolbooks

like they could shield him.

Pages torn. Chest too.

Tell me which one made the headline.

You call provocation

an art form.

But I’ve seen the aftermath.

Brick dust in baby bottles.

A prayer mat soaked in red

because someone mistook survival

for a threat.

He watches like the world is a game.

Like moves matter

more than mourning.

Like policy makes the bleeding poetic.

He calls it a fixed board.

But he never saw

a grandfather crumble

when the breadline moved faster

than his knees could carry his pride.

Never watched a sister

pluck shrapnel

from he brother’s scalp

with the same fingers

she once used to braid his hair.

He didn’t stay

long enough to learn

that grief isn’t just heavy.

It’s inherited.

Passed down like land.

Like silence.

Like the ache in a name

no longer spoken aloud.

And while he talks

of patience and pause

somewhere a boy

lines pebbles in the dirt

to mark where his mother’s hand used to be.

He measures calm

while a city unlearns

the sound of joy.

He documents decay

as if it weren’t designed.

But me?

I don’t stand above this.

I kneel in it.

I choke on the dust

and still sing.

I don’t write from distance.

I write from scars

that still speak

when no one else will.

You document decay?

Then document this.

We were meant to vanish.

But I’m still here.

We were written off.

But I rewrote it in breath.

And if you think silence wins

try outlasting the voice

that refuses to break.

I don’t want your podium.

I built my own

from bones and borrowed rhythm.

And if history forgets us

I will write it again.

With ash.

With cadence.

With fire.

I’m not the author of peace.

I’m what comes after.

JERRY:

And you think fire burns brightest in the hands that feed it.

Maybe it does — for a while.

But fire doesn’t ask whose name is on the manifest,

or who authorized the drop.

It consumes indiscriminately —

policy, pride, and promises

until all that’s left is embers

and the analysts still narrating cause and effect

as if anyone beneath the rubble cares.

You call me distant, cold, a chronicler of facts.

That’s fair.

I know how you feel.

You hold Samir’s torn schoolbooks; I hold a dispatch with too many redactions.

Your grief is granular, close enough to taste the concrete dust.

Mine is scaled and sourced —

no less real, just harder to sell

to an audience that wants its suffering spoon-fed between segments.

You kneel in the dirt;

I stare at satellite feeds.

Both of us see the same shattered blocks, the same trembling hands —

but one of us knows what comes next:

a ceasefire signed too late,

a donor conference applauded too loudly,

another shipment held at the border “for review.”

And after?

After they call it quiet —

a different kind of loud begins.

The debt. The blame.

The sanctioned silences that say, “That was last cycle,”

as if history were a payroll

and pain an invoice.

You say you’ll write it again with fire —

but who will read it?

The generals who lost the ledger?

The ministers who never stepped off the tarmac?

Or the ghosts who never had the luxury of a byline?

Here’s my part:

I will document.

Every overlooked casualty.

Every policy folded into folded bodies.

Every summit that led nowhere but to more summitry.

And if they forget —

as they always do —

I’ll remind them that even dust keeps its own record,

and the ashes remember the hands that scattered them.

You may fight with breath and voice,

I fight with evidence.

And believe me,

evidence never stays quiet —

not forever.

SHAIN:

They call it quiet.

We know better.

We know the kind of silence

that hums behind the ribs.

That clings to concrete.

That shivers in the space between two explosions.

That teaches a child

to fear laughter

because it sounds too much like what came before.

You talk of sanctioned silences.

We talk of scar tissue.

We talk of digging with teaspoons

because hands are too tired

and shovels too loud.

You see pause.

We see reload.

You ask who will read my fire?

No one needs to.

Because my fire doesn’t ask for eyes—

it leaves smoke in your lungs.

This isn’t for readers.

This is for reminders.

For echoes too stubborn to die.

For those too used to begging for a headline

that never comes.

You fight with evidence.

I fight with everything evidence missed.

The scream not caught on tape.

The tear absorbed by dirt.

The child who stopped speaking,

because language failed her too.

You measure ruins.

I breathe through them.

You brought reports.

I brought a reckoning.

Yours get filed.

Mine get felt.

Yours are timestamped.

Mine are timeless.

You don’t document decay.

You normalize it.

You name it pattern.

We name it funeral.

You say “trajectory.”

We say teeth.

You observe.

I absorb.

You compose.

I carry.

You interpret.

I endure.

But don’t mistake endurance for peace.

We are not calm.

We are coiled.

And when your servers fail,

when the timeline erases us,

when even memory becomes an inconvenience—

we will still be here.

Not because we were saved.

Because we refused to disappear.

You stand on a podium.

I stand at the edge.

And even from here,

my voice reaches farther.

You asked who will read the fire?

The wind will.

The soil will.

The child who hums to the dark

because her lullabies were buried with her sister,

she will.

You built your case with facts.

I built mine with flame.

Not to destroy.

To mark what was never supposed to be erased.

So go ahead.

Send your final draft.

Polish your prose.

Measure the temperature of a war you never entered.

I don’t write for applause.

I write so the world can’t say

they didn’t know.

And if it angers you that I speak this loud—

good.

That’s the point. The… entire fucking point.

I don’t want your attention.

I want your walls to tremble.

I want your broadcasts interrupted

by the sound of names that never stopped echoing.

Not grief like gospel.

Grief like thunder.

Low. Relentless.

Unforgiving to the ear that tries to tune it out.

You speak of aftermath.

I am the aftermath.

Breathing.

Bruised.

Bleeding.

And still spelling every stolen name,

until the ink runs dry.

And when it does?

I won’t write with ash,

I’ll carve it into stone.

So when the last truth burns,

mine’s the one that doesn’t flinch.

They wanted silence.

They got scripture.

I’m not the echo.

I’m the event.

And when the story folds,

it folds around me….around us.

Ash-breather.

Name-keeper.

The reason silence now stutters.

History won’t remember who wrote the report.

But it will never forget who set it ablaze.

WHEN THE LAST ECHO REFUSES TO FADE

There will always be more summits, more soundbites, and more empty promises of peace. And there will always be people who have to carry the ashes and speak the truth that can't fit into a press release.

This partnership is not an ending; it is a reckoning. It serves as a reminder that poetry may be a form of resistance when realpolitik strives to erase the past. That someone will still say the names when the world moves on to the next killing. That someone will make it shake when silence is used as a weapon.

They will say this is fury. We call it remembering. The fire will keep writing itself into history as long as one voice burns, refuses to bow, and refuses to go away.

This is what lives on. This is what remains.

Sealed and Signed:

Jerry B. Marchant & Shain Parwiz

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and

Shain Parwiz