STEVEN'S APPEARANCES ON CRIME STORIES WITH NANCY GRACE...
"Steven Lampley, highly regarded police veteran and SVU detective." Nancy Grace
​
Perp Guns Down Dad of Three Over Parking Spot
​
Imprisoned Husband Receives Xbox in Return for Telling Where He Buried His Wife
​
Hania Aguilar Found Dead in North Carolina
​
High School Teacher Allegedly Shoots Ex-Husband's Girlfriend in Front of Her Children
​
​
​
​
​
OFFICIAL CRIME & FORENSICS MERCHANDISE...
Click On Image for Sizes, Description, and Price!
C&F
Women's T-Shirt
C&F
Ball Cap
C&F
Men's T-Shirt
C&F
Keychain
C&F
Coffee Cup
C&F
Canvas Tote Bag
ONLINE
SEMINARS
FORENSICS AND CRIMINAL JUSTICE SEMINARS
Steven David Lampley
Official Site of Number One Best Selling Author
&
Multi-Published Poet
Steven David Lampley’s impact on English literature lies in his redefinition of contemporary free verse as a form of witness rather than performance.
At a time when much modern poetry leans toward abstraction, irony, or self-referential introspection, Lampley re-centers the genre on lived consequence, moral accountability, and marginalized human experience.
His work extends the lineage of socially grounded writers while rejecting romanticism, forcing English-language poetry back into direct contact with poverty, grief, addiction, violence, and survival without aesthetic distance.
Lampley’s poems function less as crafted artifacts and more as records, testimony that preserves voices often excluded from literary history.
This approach has influenced how free verse can operate within English literature: not as emotional exhibitionism, but as ethical documentation. By writing with restraint, clarity, and unflinching realism, he has contributed to a shift toward poetry that values truth over ornamentation, ensuring that English literature continues to reflect not just language at its most beautiful, but humanity at its most real.
Books
Bio
Steven David Lampley is an American free verse poet whose work confronts the raw, unfiltered realities of life at society’s edges. Known for an unflinching voice and stark emotional honesty, Lampley writes with a precision that refuses sentimentality while offering deep compassion for the forgotten, the broken, and the unseen. His poetry lives in the spaces most people avoid—poverty, grief, addiction, violence, loneliness, and survival—rendered with a clarity that feels both intimate and relentless.
Drawing from a life shaped by service, loss, and lived experience, Lampley’s work carries an authority that cannot be manufactured. Before becoming widely recognized as a poet, he served in the military and later as a police officer, including time in high-crime areas and investigative work that exposed him to the most difficult aspects of the human condition. These experiences did not harden his writing; instead, they sharpened it. His poems are informed by what he has seen firsthand: families unraveling, people breaking quietly, and resilience existing where hope should not logically survive.Lampley’s poetry is often described as brutal yet tender, minimalist yet emotionally dense. He favors stripped-down language, allowing silence, restraint, and implication to do as much work as the words themselves. Comparisons to Bukowski arise frequently, but readers and critics alike note that
Lampley’s work diverges in its moral gravity and empathy. Where others may observe from a distance, Lampley writes from inside the wreckage, giving voice to those who are rarely granted one.
His poems explore themes of grief, fatherhood, abandonment, trauma, and endurance, often blurring the line between personal memory and collective experience. While his work is frequently assumed to be autobiographical, Lampley has emphasized that his poetry speaks through him rather than about him—serving as a vessel for countless lives and stories absorbed over decades of close contact with suffering and survival.
Steven David Lampley is a number one bestselling author and has had multiple poems published in literary magazines, including The Uncommon Courier. His work has been widely shared and discussed for its emotional impact and authenticity. He is currently listed among the top five free verse poets in the United States within the genre of Life & Struggles, a distinction reflecting both the reach of his work and its resonance with readers who recognize themselves in his lines.
His poetry books stand out as a testament to his central mission as a poet: to tell the truth without decoration, to honor pain without exploiting it, and to remind readers that even in the bleakest circumstances, being seen can be a form of survival.
A LIFE: A TRILOGY
​
PART ONE: The Arrival
Poverty stricken,
that's putting it kindly.
No crib, a dirty,
worn mattress,
piss stains,
cigarette stench in the walls.
​
He arrived to no joy,
no smiles.
Another mouth needing food.
Number three on the list,
just a body needing space.
​
His cries, unanswered.
Mother's eyes sunken and his
father fled to some
midnight promise of
lady who slipped out by dawn.
​
His parents were the streets,
they new him.
​
At seven,
alleyways were friends.
A teddy bear he found in a dumpster,
missing an eye,
he held tight at night,
as he imagined his mom
might have held him...
she never did.
Beer bottle caps and smoky
butts of cigarettes were games
he imagined on his own.
​
His domain,
broken glass, hunger, and
hopelessness.
Other kids had good clothes,
smiles, and parents.
They had things he didn't.
His anger grew,
mostly turned inward.
​
His clinched fists were
for food, territory.
​
At twelve,
he realized he was alone,
no one was coming,
no one to bring him out of the streets,
no one smiling, "you matter."
He was nothing to no one.
He wondered what love was like.
​
PART TWO: The Struggle
Manhood came early,
but to most,
twelve was still a child.
Life had no soft words for him,
no love, no hugs,
just the reality of
concrete and survival and
a pervert offering cash.
​
Hunger was always.
His stomach and heart, gnawing.
He was hollow,
still existing.
​
He had jobs,
now and then,
the ones others never wanted.
Archaic stone structures with
choking thick smoke and, warehouses.
Maybe he'd work a month...
if he was lucky, but
fights and the bottle
got in the way.
​
A man without a face amongst
concrete that never cared.
​
Love was unknown to him,
just an occasional alley thing.
Each took and left
him lonelier than before.
​
Shy of forty,
lost chances.
He had no dreams,
not anymore,
never did, really.
Fantasies to never come true.
Hope was a bad con man,
the streets taught him that.
​
Older now, slower,
but the same hunger
the same streets,
and same dank hopelessness.
​
He'd chuckle out loud sometimes,
at the absurdity of life.
​
PART THREE: The End
Not remembering well,
sixty-three?
He was not even noticed any more.
His face, haggard, torn, lifeless.
Years of fighting, surviving,
taken their part and left a cracked shell,
as a crack in the sidewalk that
everyone stepped on, over.
​
The occasional jobs
shut down,
too old, slow, a carcass.
Taking a space of
someone who
could produce.
Not even the factories wanted his time.
​
He begged,
stole a pack of Ramen or six,
and had a dumpster route.
His hunger was not the same,
it was in his bones.
​
The empty bottles of escape
all around his space in the alley,
dumpster behind Friedman's.
​
He felt it coming,
colder, deeper inside.
Air was scarce within his lungs.
Coughing.
He had nothing to lose,
he never had anything.
​
He died,
it was quiet,
he passed sitting,
leaning on the pipe behind Friedman's.
​
He had peed himself and
clutched tightly, his teddy bear
as if his mom was holding him as a child.
He always wondered what that would
have been like.
​
© Steven David Lampley
REVIEW
A LIFE:A TRILOGY
​
A LIFE: A TRILOGY is a devastatingly effective piece of narrative free verse that does exactly what Lampley’s strongest work is known for: it refuses comfort, refuses sentimentality, and instead bears witness.
This poem is not written to impress, it is written to remember, to document, and to confront. In three stark movements, The Arrival, The Struggle, and The End, Lampley chronicles an entire human life stripped of romance, safety, and mercy, yet never stripped of humanity.
​
Part One: The Arrival
Brutal in its restraint, Lampley opens with conditions rather than emotions, forcing the reader to experience environment before identity.
The imagery is blunt and unsanitized: the mattress, the stains, the smell embedded in the walls.
These details are not decorative, they are foundational. By the time the child is described as “just a body needing space,” the poem has already indicted a world that reduces life to logistics.
One of the most powerful elements here is the teddy bear found in a dumpster, missing an eye.
It becomes the poem’s central symbol, damaged, discarded, yet clung to for survival.
This object quietly carries the emotional weight the parents never do.
The line “His parents were the streets, they knew him” is especially effective, encapsulating abandonment without melodrama.
​
Part Two: The Struggle
​
This marks the loss of childhood entirely.
Lampley collapses age into experience, twelve becomes manhood not by choice, but by threat and hunger.
The poem’s pacing mirrors the monotony of survival: short jobs, longer hunger, fleeting contact that only deepens isolation.
Hope itself is personified as a fraud, “a bad con man," a line that perfectly aligns with the poem’s philosophy.
This section is emotionally exhausting by design.
There is no upward arc, no redemption subplot. Instead, the reader is forced to sit with stagnation, which is precisely the point.
Lampley understands that for many, struggle is not a chapter, it is the whole book.
​
Part Three: The End
​
Where the poem becomes truly haunting.
The language slows, thins, and fades just as the subject does. Society no longer even exploits him; it simply steps over him.
The comparison of the man to a crack in the sidewalk is quietly devastating, something created by pressure, ignored until it becomes unavoidable, then still ignored.
The final image returns to the teddy bear, completing the trilogy with painful symmetry.
The man dies not as he lived, but as he began: clinging to the idea of comfort he never received.
The line “as if his mom was holding him as a child” is not sentimental; it is tragic precisely because it is imagined.
​
Overall.
​
A LIFE: A TRILOGY succeeds because it never pretends this story is rare.
Lampley does not frame his subject as exceptional, he frames him as representative.
This is social realism at its most honest, written with a poet’s precision and a witness’s restraint.
The poem forces readers to acknowledge the quiet lives that pass through alleys, factories, and sidewalks without applause or memory.
It is not a poem meant to be enjoyed, it is meant to be carried.
​
Steven David Lampley’s achievement here is simple and profound: he gives dignity to a life the world never did.
Additional Writings by Steven
What People
Are
Saying
Steven is quite the storyteller. He has a talent for writing, filling the reader with emotion. You'll leave inspired. Get ready for
the ride.
Marlena Smith
THE LIFE I LIVE
Steven does a masterful job of, not only taking us onto the beat and streets with him, but finding gems of life-truths that we can take away from his war stories. May all of us learn them well.
Troy King,
ALABAMA ATTORNEY GENERAL
He can take that information and relay it in a way anyone can understand.
Nancy Grace,
CRIME STORIES WITH NANCY GRACE
"Steven David Lampley unveils
the unseen, inviting us to
explore the depths of
human emotions."
"In Lampley's poetry, each line is a journey into the human psyche."
