Joe Balaz

YOU ARE GOING TO NEED AQUALUNGS

So here you are

the latest fad

in a slow week.

Strutting

like a peacock

in your fully spread finery

you aim

to become the  messenger

of a towering

and influential

beacon of flame.

Yeah right,

you just turn everything

into instantaneous ash

with too little

or too much

at the wrong expected  time.

You don’t impress me

with your flash in the pan.

I therefore challenge you

to provoke me into thinking

that there’s something

worth considering

in anything

that you have to say.

I’m not being

overly critical 

or even setting

impossible boundaries.

It’s just that

I go so deep

that you are going to need

aqualungs to reach me.  

COOL DEFINITE

The open road is that way—

Start moving in that correction.

You got the memo

and you got the ammo,

so go and cross that desert

just like a determined camel.

The oasis is ahead,

where others have been led,

and with the filling water

and the earthly greens

that you will eat,

your mind will be refreshed

and fed.

That is a definition

of a cool definite,

definitely.

LIKE A SCARECROW NOW

Get up to speed guys,

and ladies too,

because I don’t have time

to puck around.

The goalie looked

like he was moving in slow motion,

when I slammed the previous puck

into the back of the net,

and left him flailing his arms,

as he was grabbing nothing but air.

I got some instantaneous news

for all of you,

because I’m blazing

down the ice again,

to slam another puck

into the back of the net

past the goalie,

who looks and moves

like a scarecrow now.

Joe Balaz writes in American English and in Hawaiian Islands Pidgin (HIP). He is a writer, visual artist, and freelance improv musician, who has created works in poetry, visual poetry, and music poetry. Balaz has been published nationally and internationally. He is the author of Pidgin Eye, a book of poetry, and he is also the editor of 13 Miles from Cleveland, an online literary, art, and music magazine. Balaz presently lives in Cleveland, Ohio.