A Happy Human Disaster

poems by

Martin Balgach

~80 pages, $15 (+ shipping)

Projected Release Date: May/June 2025

An Advance Sale Discount price of $8.50 (+ shipping) is available HERE prior to press time. This price is not available anywhere else or by check. The check price is $13/book (which includes shipping & sales tax) and should be sent to: Main Street Rag, 12180 Skyview Drive, Edinboro, PA 16412. 

PLEASE NOTE: Ordering in advance of the release date entitles the buyer to a discount. It does not mean the book will ship before the date posted above and the price only applies to copies ordered through the Main Street Rag Online Bookstore.

Martin Balgach is the author of the chapbook, Too Much Breath (Main Street Rag, 2014). His writing has appeared in The Bitter Oleander, Cream City Review, Fogged Clarity, Rain Taxi, Verse Daily, and Stirring, among other journals. Also a performing songwriter, his music is available on all streaming platforms. Martin lives with his wife and son in Colorado. Please visit martinbalgach.com to read and hear more.

Keats wrote that poets must live in uncertainty, mystery, and doubt, “without any irritable reaching after fact and reason.” Martin Balgach deftly overturns what we think we know, permitting doubt to guide us. For example, this nimble mix of time, direction, and individuality: “We’re almost to 1974/and a cloud wants a mouth./Soon my father will be more alive/than all the small trees getting planted near sidewalks/in the front yards/of pretty houses/where families are smiling.” ~Natasha Saje

“Time wishes with the vigor of heartbeats,” Martin Balgach writes in a poem dedicated to Tomaž šalamun, and like šalamun, like all major poetry, this book is filled with stunning, often paradoxical language that attempts to at once come to terms with and surpass, even defeat time, and always provides unique perspectives. “I dance through time / like a sloppy ballerina,” he says at one point, and yet “The clouds / are showing me their liver spots,” he says at another point, for beyond his own perspective is a cosmos that both threatens and beckons with its potential “nothingness.” Beginning with a short history of the self and ending with the self “crawl[ing] into forever / holding my own hand,” there is, in between, the notion that “every heartbeat is a highway” leading to the hope that “Maybe our aches / aren’t different than our joys / and tomorrow is a fruit.” If so, then we are given a feast here, the fruits of a poet’s meditation that we dare not ignore and indeed must dare to embrace. ~Richard Jackson, Author of The Heart s Framed: New and Select Poems

A Short History of Me

Born with a horizon for eyes
and a heart
the color of guilt,
I remember ancestors I’ve never met.

That was lives ago
when I was more alone
than outer space.

Now, I hide secrets
in my cheeks—
like razors.

My beginning is a spark,
a Big Bang theory
disproving itself at midnight

it’s the difference
between dusk and dawn—
a curse hovering
like radar.

My lungs are made
of star shit,
the half-life of breaths,
and warm memories
that burn
like sparklers
in the hands of a child
on the last 4th of July
ever. Later,

I would become
an insect searching
for a leaf, a rock
looking for a river.

Before that I was the truth—
a static vision
on a screen
the size of a small sea.

My friend,
I am the sum
of every caution
that has ever been thrown
to the wind
and I have been killing
the softest oxygen
for years.

A Happy Human Disaster

Soft as nails getting pushed
through clouds, my thoughts
are a dipstick for blood.
Emotions run through me
like sled dogs. Everything makes me
me. I came from nothing
and am going towards everything.
As real as smudged breath
on a cold window, I am
a furnace of feeling burning memories
like chunks of coal.
I rise into the sky
like a bottle rocket
about to explode.
Nobody can catch me.
I run faster than laughter.
Quieter than a whisper and
louder than a jetliner, I taught myself
to see me and I know
I will expire—so I hold myself
how a warm hand comforts a cold hand
because it makes me angry as a bull
that no matter how hard I try,
I am impermanent. So, I dance through time
like a sloppy ballerina. I let love pretend
to matter. I paint pictures
of waves and shores
until the water tastes delicious
and some last breeze blows me
out to sea.

Broken Clouds

For Tomaž Šalamun

Less sincere
than water in the sky,
the moat that surrounds me
is filled with dead prayers

Time wishes with the vigor of heartbeats

Listen,
there are sad notes
in every song

What I mean is
I run with the bulls in my dreams

I wear a red- striped shirt
and white ascot
and my smile is as large as a sea

But I want to tell you about last night—
how fog rolled in veils
against a horizon
I had to squint to see

All these words and still
we are each alone in our memories

Forever hangs like a broken cloud

Decanting myself in its veneer
I am a nihilist with an affinity for feeling

Days keep ending
and I feel leftover

What’s the use in talking?

I am blind and this brail
bites my leg like a dog

Today is a hammer
Tomorrow—a ferry
Wants itch like mosquitoes
playing hopscotch with my heart
and I am wishing at the sky
like a child huffing out candles on a cake

Breaths echo in the smoke

But the real fire waits to finish burning
until everyone is asleep
and time has done a cannonball
onto a cloud
that shatters
into a thousand soft white pieces