Balance

don’t swing to and fro,
stay steady, don’t
hang like shoe laces on clothes line
you can’t swing, you must go to someplace
firm,
at your centre is a hurricane, made of what?
all that is felt, a cold gumbo of confusion,
you want to go where everyone knows your name
but, you get anxiety when everyone looks at you
everything is wanted both ways, the sun and
it’s opposite is needed
and you try to stay firm on ornate cement
but what’s under its hardness?
i don’t know, but the bridge of your nose, sometimes
catches vertigo.
on a park bench you sit hard and alert,
but you stare out of the window of your childhood,
the one that keeps on falling
into a myriad of pieces,
yet fits perfectly when you compose them together
in thought.

The Story

You tell yourself
You walk around telling
Yourself
It’s your history
The past
The future
You telling yourself
The story dancing around
In your skull
The stuff people said to
You
The movies you
Watched
Television shows
Music from radios
Sounds.
The stories changing
For me
Every few years.
Then me believing in a story
the story moves on
What story of the page is next?
it keeps turning,
i spill hot coffee on it, or soda
or water
the story can be be bland
or bold and spicy
or usually having highs and lows
and flatlands like Kansas
no hills at all
and sometimes you just want
the moment to unfold without
a story
and forget
next.

Wise Man

It would take years to become one
Far beyond a mortal sixty
Or eighty
To know all the things I must
Like not to go down a residential street doing seventy
It would take 400 years to learn how sit another a tree in a lotus position
100 to not follow a parade in the plaza
Fifty not to be aroused by cardboard model with synthetic lashes and teeth made by science
Eighty not to be a able to lose your temper
At some driving fool.

When You Lose

It’s as if you know
You’re going to lose
As if you’re just going
Through motions
And feel as if the machines
Know that you wanna win
That you’ll take another bet
Because you’re sad depressed
Or bored
And you’ll just stay there and take the beating and watch
It feels like they know
Everyone knows while flashing all the lights

In the rain

watching this, being sits,
the rains come downs hard,
light, then hard
this being sits, the winds pick up
and lashes out, violently
this being sits, waiting enduring
seconds, then hours, holding on
What is Time?
the storm starts up again, furiously
as if to snatch the air out of being
the being holds, drifting is not a choice
endure endure endure
the storm changes its pitch, like a cello
then rushes more, five years, ten years
the being waits in the darkness, then light
then darkness
the objects and beings, images drift away,
a baseball bat, a brown newspaper, a plastic cup
drift drift, while holding place
not one storm, but multitudes of storm
hard light, and various in duration,
light in sound, heavy
pressing the being
the being holds through.

Damion Hamilton is from St. Louis MO. His poems have appeared in Chiron Review, Poesy Magazine, Zygote In My Coffee, Red Fez, The Camel Saloon and many others. He writes poetry, stories and novels. He has written several books. ​Available here​. He can be found on Twitter.