Michael Wayne Hampton
p o e t r y
Next Life
In the next life After
we’ve been threaded through blades
of sawgrass After samsara rebirth
Garden snake to field mouse to molting
larks tiny enough to cradle
in a nest of cracked workman hands
We will watch the rays of daybreak count
under open windows bare as born knotted
on sheets damp from our backs eyes
tracking the ceiling fan lips to paper where
smoke flowers and every mote of dust
lost cell is poetry is life unfolding
In the sweetness that comes when
there’s nothing to say
Before Your Parents Were Born
To begin a simple koan
What was your face before
your parents were born?
These sheers in syllables deliberate
to sever the fetters trust that
logic has purchase time is constant
before my parents were born I was
a stack of blank pages and a pencil
draw any face you want call it was mine
In that space before I swam to the
bottoms of bottles through yellow
pharmaceutical hues nascent ancient
before an ache to love fierce enough to
fear love
before spur to cradle every last touch
born to mind motherless
before
a soul microscopic
an atom sailing a waterfall stilled
for the next coming when
with wet eyes drowned in first light
chest arched soft mouth gaped wailing life
Born to unlearn once more
Surgery
The girls you love stay buried
in viscera like shrapnel edges
tensed against parasympathetic
nerves where threads of charity
remain interred too close to arteries
to risk surgery
Wild haired girls, ink-stained and
chin down Chewing lips born
for photographers to sequence
between grey clouds haunting
shuttered grocery store skies
and the skeletons of factories
Let them go let them stay
in towns whose names you’ll forget
behind highways where road crews
jackhammer six months of summer
roll machines over tar and gravel
until the only taste left
is dust
On Silence
Rain-soaked daylight hours counted off
by finger taps on hardwood are
Dangerous too easily they spark faith
Lead to reaching into gaps of yesterdays
To warm the grey blankets of now living
In regions of wandering desperate to trust
Another’s voice or one message three-lines-long
can wrap spirit-hand around your wrist bones and
Heave your own missing above rising tide they
touch the hard part where ribs join palm visions of
intimacy past into rigid calcified center whisper
I am with you Look up! I never left
But the unsaid is the sincere lodestone of
gravity born in affections abandoned manna for
Hungry ghosts who stitch themselves through
abandoned devotion like syllables folded between larynx and hyoid
are swallowed while letters curled into journals are
crossed-out and dreams pass like promises only fog banks
Drifting toward horizon next lonesome key unstruck
Worship each unsent letter a secret child
grace of mute heartbeat of the cursor on white screen
Secure your true self behind echo crowd speak static
Mark the boundary water of attachment leave
hope and definitions unsent They are cheap currency
currents of care grounded as bare wires shoved deep
beneath the soil of history sealed in
folders in undedicated pages
The strong are wordless are
Mountains are the farthest stars and offer no prayer
for consolation for affection to matter
Offer no sacrifices to Mnemosyne or language
There is peace in pause everlasting
Silence the final providence
finds each soft place single
occult human hurt haunting dead hours
misspent on meditations of what of why and
delivers them whole to the coming of
tomorrow’s private trance of yesterdays
Where you will be too rugged or wise
or old or blind to wish words
made whole or brushed the edge
of telepathy of meaning of lingering
Had chance to hang on the wind scented
spirits for those who for a flash
cast visions out on the nightfall perimeter
Listening for a voice to join their safe in
Absence
Michael Wayne Hampton is the author of three books, as well as numerous shorter works which have appeared in publications such as Rust+Moth, McSweeney's, and The Southeast Review. He can be reached via his website michaelwaynehampton.com or on Twitter @motelheartache