Helium Poetry Quotes

When you choose to be a poet, you become a place that people walk through and then leave when they are ready

you wouldn't let me love both of us at the same time

He sketches you as the antagonist and suddenly his transgressions become deleted scenes. He blames you for his sadness. And this is how the wolf cries boy.

And the answer is not every building that shakes will collapse. The answer is not everything that chips will crumble.

If I could I would nail these hands to the edges of stars. I would sacrifice this body to the sky hoping to resurrect as someone spiteful enough to not care about you.

She tells me about dreams. She says my dreams are helium and balloons, and I've made the mistake of letting go a few to many times, but I still got this one. Tied around my finger like a wedding ring because even though I don't believe in marriages, I'm gonna bring this one home.

On the day you couldn't hold yourself together anymore, you called for me, voice crackling like two sets of knuckles before an altercation. I found you, looking like a damaged wine glass. I hugged your shatter, I cut all of my fingers trying to jigsaw puzzle you back together. When it was over, you looked at the stains on the carpet and blamed me for making a mess.

To Have Without Holding: Learning to love differently is hard, love with the hands wide open, love with the doors banging on their hinges, the cupboard unlocked, the wind roaring and whimpering in the rooms rustling the sheets and snapping the blinds that thwack like rubber bands in an open palm. It hurts to love wide open stretching the muscles that feel as if they are made of wet plaster, then of blunt knives, then of sharp knives. It hurts to thwart the reflexes of grab, of clutch, to love and let go again and again. It pesters to remember the lover who is not in the bed, to hold back what is owed to the work that gutters like a candle in a cave without air, to love consciously, conscientiously, concretely, constructively. I can't do it, you say it's killing me, but you thrive, you glow on the street like a neon raspberry, You float and sail, a helium balloon bright bachelor's buttons blue and bobbing on the cold and hot winds of our breath, as we make and unmake in passionate diastole and systole the rhythm of our unbound bonding, to have and not to hold, to love with minimized malice, hunger and anger moment by moment balanced.

I know that our hands break things just as frequent as we can fix them. And we often forget that sexism / is a family heirloom that we've been passing down for generations. As men, it is important that we start asking ourselves / What will the boys learn from us?

Love is clumsy, and my heart refuses to wear a helmet.

The most destructive instruments can still create a melody worth dancing to.

When you are the only black man in the whole neighborhood, your skin is that one friend who meets everyone before you do. It wears a wife beater and house shoes, it knocks over the neighbor's mailbox, it cusses in front of the kids and plays the music too loud, but you actually don't do any of those things. It's 7 PM. It's Wednesday and you are just walking home.

I enjoy.... laughing for absolutely no reason at all, but I don't allow myself to cry as often as I need to. I have solar-powered confidence and a battery-operated smile. My hobbies include: editing my life story, hiding behind metaphors, and trying to convince my shadow that I'm someone worth following. I don't know much, but I do know this: Heaven is full of music, and God listens to my heartbeat

Remember we are never given anything that we can't handle. When the world crumbles around you, sometimes you gotta look at the wreckage and then build a new one out of all the pieces that are still here. Remember that you are still here. The human heart, it beats approximately 4,000 times per hour. And each pulsin' and each throbbin' and each palpitation is a trophy engraved with the words "you are still alive.

And sometimes it all arrives at once. The anxiety, the fear, the voices that scratch your confidence like a chalkboard and somehow all the oxygen in the room suddenly becomes water and you begin to wonder if you have what it takes to grow gills. You wonder if you can blend in with the fish. You wonder if you will ever breathe again. And the answer is not every building that shakes will collapse. The answer is not everything that chips will crumble. The answer is this is temporary and yes, you will.

I held you the way a boat holds water.

When I call you brother, it means you have at least four fists during any fight you can't walk yourself out of.

I don't know much, but I do know this: Heaven is full of music, and God listens to my heartbeat on his iPod. It reminds him that we still got work to do.

So I've never caught a live grenade with my bare hands. So I don't know exactly how it feels, but I imagine it's a lot like getting a text that says, "Hey we really need to talk.

In one of my earliest memories, I am eight years old, I have a fistful of afternoon, and I am asking the summer if it will always be this glorious. I remember taking a deep breath. Trying to get as much July into my lungs as humanly possible and thinking maybe I'd be able to convince it that 31 days just isn't enough.

Tell me a story and let's laugh like it's the only think keeping us alive. Play a song and give the stereo permission to use its outside voice. Let's sing loudly, offbeat and out of tune. Let the world know we don't care how it sounds because the only key we need is already in the ignition. Let the sky turn the windshield into a stage. Watch it dance like he scenery is auditioning to be part of our story. Let's just go. Drive until our troubles phantom in the rearview mirror and we forget the exist, at least for a moment.

To the man standing on the corner holding the sign that said “God hates gays.” I’ve never seen, exactly who it is that you paperclip your knees, meld your hands together and pray to But I think I know what he looks like: I bet your God is about 5’10”. I bet he weighs 185. Probably stands the way a high school diploma does when it’s next to a GED. I bet your god has a mullet. I bet he wears flannel shirts with no sleeves, a fanny pack and says words like “getrdun.” I bet your god—I bet your god—I bet your god watches FOX news, Dog the Bounty Hunter, voted for John McCain, and loves Bill O’Reilly. I bet your god lives in Arizona. I bet his high school served racism in the cafeteria and offered “hate speech” as a second language. I bet he has a swastika inside of his throat, and racial slurs tattooed to his tongue just to make intolerance more comfortable in his mouth. I bet he has a burning cross as a middle finger and Jim Crow underneath his nails. Your god is a confederate flags wet dream conceived on a day when the sky decided to slice her own wrists, I bet your god has a drinking problem. I bet he sees the bottom of the shot glass more often than his own children. I bet he pours whiskey on his dreams until they taste like good ideas, Probably cusses like an electric guitar with Tourette’s plugged into an ocean. I bet he yells like a schizophrenic nail gun, damaging all things that care about him enough to get close. I bet there are angels in Heaven with black eyes and broken halos who claimed they fell down the stairs. I bet your god would’ve made Eve without a mouth and taught her how to spread her legs like a magazine that she will never ever ever be pretty enough to be in. Sooner or later you will realize that you are praying to your own shadow, that you are standing in front of mirrors and are worshipping your own reflection. Your God stole my god’s identity and I bet he’s buying pieces of heaven on eBay. So next time you bend your knees, next time you bow your head I want you to tell your god— that my god is looking for him.

I was 18 wen I started driving I was 18 the first time I was pulled over. It was 2 AM on a Saturday The officer spilled his lights all over my rearview mirror, he splashed out of the car with his hand already on his weapon, and looked at me the way a tsunami looks at a beach house. Immediately, I could tell he was the kind of man who brings a gun to a food fight. He called me son and I thought to myself, that's an interesting way of pronouncing "boy," He asks for my license and registration, wants to know what I'm doing in this nieghborhood, if the car is stolen, if I have any drugs and most days, I know how to grab my voice by the handle and swing it like a hammer. But instead, I picked it up like a shard of glass. Scared of what might happen if I didn't hold it carefully because I know that this much melanin and that uniform is a plotline to a film that can easily end with a chalk outline baptism, me trying to make a body bag look stylish for the camera and becoming the newest coat in a closet full of RIP hashtags. Once, a friend of a friend asked me why there aren't more black people in the X Games and I said, "You don't get it." Being black is one of the most extreme sports in America. We don't need to invent new ways of risking our lives because the old ones have been working for decades. Jim Crow may have left the nest, but our streets are still covered with its feathers. Being black in America is knowing there's a thin line between a traffic stop and the cemetery, it's the way my body tenses up when I hear a police siren in a song, it's the quiver in my stomach when a cop car is behind me, it's the sigh of relief when I turn right and he doesn't. I don't need to go volcano surfing. Hell, I have an adrenaline rush every time an officer drives right past without pulling me over and I realize I'm going to make it home safe. This time.

The Pressure Cooker by Stewart Stafford We arrive at the sweltering park, And disturb a larcenous squirrel, Trash can raider with easy spoils, He scampers away down the back. Solo lady in the gazebo watches, An outdoor Mrs. Bates silhouette, As a tuft of angel hair rolls along, I give the thirsty baby hydration. Transfixed by a burst helium balloon, Rocking itself to the unheard beats, Arid breeze, now ceiling conductor, Our squirrel pal returns to spy on us. © Stewart Stafford, 2022. All rights reserved.

It's like crawling into a cave I always knew was there but never explored. I remember putting my head into his salesman's briefcase when I was young. This time the bright eye I entered pulls away, a helium balloon. The musty air wheezes, sighs trapped for years in old motel rooms. Further down the sound turns to grey drippings that fall on my cheeks. Some boy has been here before. Burned matches in a corner, a tennis shoe, unreadable scratchings on the walls. This is far enough. Turning to find my way out, I tiptoe along a narrow black stream where white hands are rising, sinking. I find myself stepping into the water: like slipping my small feet into large dark shoes, it is deeper than I expected. Up to my knees, my waist, I see the opening again— a circle of sky cut with a dull car key, a blue mouth singing a melody I know by heart but have never heard before. As I go under, my arms, thick as my father's, reach above the surface then return to embrace me.

I was born and raised in California. And here, our models and rivers look like they're on the same diet. Throughout the years, I've watched both get smaller and now I can see their ribs when they exhale. In California, our freeways are decorated with signs that ask us to be careful about how we use the water. They hang like an eviction notice from the environment. I wonder how long it will take the planet to tell us we can't live here and the locks are changed.

I wonder if the next generation will know water the way I did. The way it ruins through the fingers, the way it wrinkles the hands, cools the skin, the way it freezes, flakes and kisses the ground on the cheek. I wonder if my grandkids will ever throw a penny in a fountain and hear it splash

Yesterday, I injured myself and the explanation didn't make sense. I said, "Well, I was walking..." and that was the end of the story. At this age, my body is a stranger that I keep meeting over and over again. The words "I am" are slowly transforming into "I used to be

Yesterday I tripped over my self-esteem, landed on my pride and it shattered like an iPhone with a broken face. Now I can't even tell who's trying to give me a compliment.

Somewhere someone's uncle or father, a man wearing sandals and khaki shorts who says "back in my day" far too often, is on the grill. He is watching the food like he's afraid it'll change its mind about being a meal and decide to run off when no one's looking. The kids are playing a game that they made up themselves and changing the rules every five minutes. Their smiles are so big, you can fit history inside of them and still have room for right now and the future. The adults hate all the new music, but still want the teenagers to teach them the dances. The cupid Shuffle is common ground and the wobble is a peace treaty signed by both generations. There are no rallies today, no blood on this street, no hashtags here, but there is barbecue, potato salad and greens. The only tears you will see is when someone lifts the foil and all the mac and cheese is finished.

Liberty In 1983, illusionist David Copperfield made the Statue of Liberty disappear. He placed a curtain in front of the monument and when he pulled it down the 3,000-foot statue was no longer there. I think about how this magic trick has become too familiar. Liberty just vanishing without any explanations