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wes parham May 2014
Always, I have been here before.
I tried living backwards with her,
Asking the questions after her answers,
Falling in love once she was long gone.
But that was another, not the same, in a chain of serial Dulcineas.
But then you came along and climbed down from that pedestal,
you slapped me,
Hard,
But laughed,
And I realized,
how you had been right,
All along.
You've got it all wrong.  You're doing it wrong.  Listen to that coarse voice because it is much more practical than you.  There is nothing romantic about a pining Quixote, he's just another giant mouth to feed.  Elevation and desire, the one you need is not the one you want, candy is sweet, but can give you indigestion.  Life's best lessons are painful, don't ignore their value.
Hear that noise here:
https://soundcloud.com/warmphase/i-have-always-been-here-before
wes parham May 2014
His love for her made her
More like him.
Her love for him made him
Like her more.
His love for her made him
More like her.
Moreover, for them,
She made love more like him.
He made love, at her whim,
More like her than like him.
The heart embraces what the eyes have made welcome.
A relationship evolves constantly, motives and incentives shift, carrying lovers along a river unlike what they could ever dream of predicting or controlling.  That said, I wrote much of this only for it's clever wordplay, the rhythms of speech, and to impress a woman.  Oh, fatal vanity!!   Hear it read aloud here:
https://soundcloud.com/warmphase/like-her-more
wes parham Apr 2014
I floated in the corner, and I waited for a sign,
From the place where visions come at cost,
Where three sharp eyes, two heads, inclined,
To see me where I stood and spoke,
Aloud, to no avail,
Some truth, some lies, some love, some hate,
Was then I felt the nail.
Two eyes spoke, but only then,
To ask that I had felt,
The flesh that held the nail I bore,
From up there where they knelt.
The single eye was silent, still!
She would not even cast,
Her monoscopic field of view on all this violence past.
If only she would turn her face,
And three eyes become four,
Then she might open for the one,
Come knocking on her door...
Speaking with two friends, one fully attentive, the other, a female, turned aside.  The speaker seeks to reach the inattentive female with his rambling, lies, truth, love, hate...  The first, the only one attentive, gives the speaker a hard time about his statements, driving this nail of pain and maybe shame.  The speaker laments that the single eye, this female with her head turned and focused sideways, could just look at him, or give some slight glimmer of recognition,  that she would see his need, open a door, know that he wants, sorely, just to reach her.
wes parham Apr 2014
"Nothing waits below for you", mermaids smiled, and spoke to me.
Memory fled, then all I knew was written on the sea.
Great paragraphs, on ocean swells,
In running, sodden ink,
The bow broke foam from recollections,
My wedding day,
I think.
Words rose up the sides of waves,
and flung me down the other side.
Then licked the shore for crumbs they found,
That rose up in the tide.
Heartbeat slowed, my body sank,
Turned empty eyes beneath.
Rays of light revealed your face,
Colossal, in the reef.
The poet's memories are stripped away as his life is ending.  Drowning at sea, his final sight is the staggering vision of beauty in a human face, seen formed out of the reef on the sea floor.    Inspired by a dream and after a steady musical diet of nick cave's "push the sky away", including a track called "mermaids" which contains the haunting verse:
"I believe in the rapture, for I've seen your face,
  on the floor of the ocean, at the bottom of the rays..."
Hear that noise recited by the author here:
https://soundcloud.com/warmphase/oceans-floor
wes parham Apr 2014
Miss sits in silence and understands,
Nothing breaks the spell.
Missing nothing, understanding,
As far as I can tell.
Miss spoke and said, the word was "sure",
An understanding guess,
Missing understanding pure,
The answer could be "yes".
Miss came and understood for sure,
But wouldn't stay for long.
Thought was insufficient lure,
When I think my guess was wrong.
You think you know what's happening beneath the surface, but you don't, you really don't.  Let it ride, give your thoughts time to let it go properly.  This one's for those being misunderstood, whether you know it or not.  This one's a shoe in your face when you thought you had it all figured out but you were wrong.
Hear the author shovel that noise here:
https://soundcloud.com/warmphase/when-miss-understood
wes parham Apr 2014
Twice lost, one soul appeared, unbidden,
Ambushed, in plain sight.
Results?     All hidden.
As I walked, I thought of this,
Imagined as I sought,
A sign of full surrender,
In the battles that we fought.
I threw what always seemed, to you,
The ordnance of the soul,
Words on leaves and tissue tigers,
Weak and boring, far from whole.
My engine had an inner working, impossible to see.
My feet still carry me to you,
And you just stare at me.
It was bad enough to have her occupy every minute of my brain's time.  She ignored me like an Olympic class apathetic, but my feet, those damnable devices of divination, could find her like a dowser's wand.  I began to see this as open hostilities on the part of my angels and muses, to torture my animal so.  Fighting to be heard, fighting to be seen, forced to always find and helpless to engage the enemy at such unexpected close quarters.
wes parham Apr 2014
His feet carried him there with no plan but to see.
Beyond that, the ****** appendages were ******* useless.
But he can't blame his feet for the failures above,
In the brain that is always awash in a chemical storm,
Not of it's creation,
But rather, from failures up higher,
Where angels throw darts and roll dice with God,
(who disdains such a sport),
And anyway...
So, here he is again,
With a mind full of wonder,
When he wants only, sorely, for this:
To have something to say,
Through the fog and the chatter,
To find that within,
Which is real.
If you've ever been drawn to someone, but never felt able to connect, it was probably just your useless feet dragging you over to talk to her (or him as it suits), but then just leaving you there afterward, brain terrified and devoid of anything reasonable to say, much less entice the mermaid to further intrigue.  The poem ultimately gives up, blaming a whimsical deity and bored host of angels.  Sigh...
If this sounds familiar, then this poem is dedicated to you.  
You are not alone, not by a long shot.

Read here by the author:
https://soundcloud.com/warmphase/useless-feet?in=warmphase/sets/poems

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