Helium by Rudy Francisco

Source of book: I own this

 

Rudy Francisco is a poet and spoken word artist from San Diego. I can’t remember exactly how I discovered him, but last year I ran across a poem of his and decided I needed to add him to my poetry collection. Helium was published in 2017, with most of the poems written before Trump’s first election. I mention this because some of the political references make more sense if you understand they pre-date the Trump Era. 

 

At the outset, let me say that I really loved this book. Francisco has a way of putting into words things that I have tried to express myself, but never in such poetic and metaphorical language. While I wasn’t able to find information on his religious background, it seems clear from his poems that he, like me, was raised Christian, but has struggled with the way most American Christianity is just a cesspit of right-wing politics, white supremacy, patriarchy, and worship of money and power. 

 

The poems are also deeply personal and introspective. He is open about his struggles with mental health, his failed relationships, and his despair at the state of the world. I found that I was deeply touched by his words, and recognized so much of my own feelings. 

 

This is what poetry does best: telling the truth slant, expressing the unutterable, finding metaphors that can bring us together through our common human experience. 

 

I shared a couple of these poems on Facebook, and got a lot of response from friends of various ages and backgrounds. Francisco has really captured something here. 

 

I also want to make it clear that I strongly encourage my readers to purchase the collections by living poets that I feature. Don’t just enjoy the ones on my blog (which isn’t monetized). Please support those who make our world better with their art. 

 

The world needs more poetry in it, in my opinion. Sadly, even English teachers that my kids have had have often neglected poetry. I don’t get that. Not all writing should be prose. Poetry has a unique role in human expression, and it isn’t a secondary one that can be ignored. I will specifically mention my youngest kid’s 9th grade English teacher, Mr. Purdy, who did a whole unit on poetry that included writing formal poems and reading them at a poetry cafe on campus, hot chocolate included. This is what the world needs more of, and I love it when teachers make poetry fun and interesting. 

 

Back to this book. I will definitely be adding additional collections by Rudy Francisco after reading this one. 

 

Here are the poems that I decided to feature. Again, as often happens, I could have picked any of the poems, because there are so many great ones. 

 

This first one caught my eye because of the unusual metaphor at the end, and also that hilarious line by the brother. Fortunately, my own swimming experience wasn’t nearly so traumatic. 

 

Water

 

When I was six years old,

my brother and my cousins

tried to teach me how to swim.

 

They did this by throwing me into a pool.

Immediately, my arms became two skinny

brown flailing distress signals.

 

I think I heard my brother say,

“If he dies, I’m going to be in so much trouble.”

I remember them pulling me from the jaws

of the liquid beast before it could devour me whole.

That was the day I almost lost my life.

 

To anyone brave enough to love me,

 

Do you know the human body is approximately 

sixty percent water? When I walk into a room

full of people, all I see is an ocean. 

 

That’s so good. 

 

This next one really resonates for me, as a middle-aged man whose body tends to do this all the time. 

 

Ouch

 

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.”

 

because every year,

the past tense finds a larger house

inside the neighborhood of my 

everyday vernacular.

 

I am slowly realizing that

when the skeleton is new

and the bones are vibrant,

 

they coerce the mind into 

thinking the days will pass,

but the flesh will not.

 

Youth promises us immortality,

but it doesn’t have the means to

uphold its end of the bargain.

 

Here is another one that resonates with me at my time of life, having spent the last 15+ years deconstructing and realizing more and more of my past mistakes. 

 

Instructions

 

Gather your mistakes,

rinse them with honesty

and self-reflection,

 

let dry until you

can see every choice

and the regret

becomes brittle,

 

cover the

entire surface 

in forgiveness,

 

remind yourself

that you are human

 

and this too

is a gift.

 

And, of course, trying to do better as I get older. 

 

This next one is bittersweet, and it unfortunately reflects the way my parents alienated first my wife, then my children, and eventually me as well. 

 

Vanish

 

They will push you away, tell you

to leave, but have no idea how good

you are at following instructions.

 

When you vanish, but your ghost

becomes a guest they cannot get rid of

 

and the memory of you plays

resurrection with their smile,

 

they will ask where you went,

if you will come back and why

you gave up so easily,

 

as if they didn’t own the voice

that requested your disappearance.

 

They now know solitude does not

scare people like us

 

and our absence is something

that we are not afraid to give

to those who call for it.

 

To this day, my parents seem unable to understand that it was their voices that requested that my wife disappear from the family, and that that was ultimately what doomed our relationship. 

 

Some of the poems are overtly political, and they are outstanding, in the way that Langston Hughes’ political poems speak to more than the moment they were written in. Here are my favorites of many. The first is all about toxic masculinity, and seems more relevant than ever.

 

Chameleon

 

When I was in the 5th grade I knew a kid

named Javier. He was black, which was confusing.

 

He was an African-American kid who spoke

Spanish, loved country music, wore cowboy

 

boots, played jump rope and had a look on his

face that said: I wish a motherfucker would say

 

something. None of us said anything. For show

and tell, he brings in his pet chameleon. When he

 

walks in, the eyes of every kid glaze over like the

windows to our souls shook hands with the winter

 

for the first time. A girl with box springs in her throat

felt the silence and it was just too heavy for her fingertips

 

to hold onto so she drops the quiet like a suitcase full of 

habits that no one wants to keep and says, “So what’s his name?”

 

He replies, “I call him Rudy.” When the class realized that me

and the lizard had the same name, they laughed uncontrollably.

 

Twenty years later, the irony hits me over the head like an empty 

Heineken bottle inside of the bar fight that I call my everyday life.

 

I get it. Chameleons have the ability to paintbrush themselves 

into whatever will match their surroundings. They do it so often,

 

they probably wouldn’t be able to recognize a photograph of their

own skin. They think it is far better to be invisible than it is to

 

grind their teeth into “I dare you” and to ride their bones like a 

magic carpet, no steering wheel, no tires, no brakes, no battery

 

just bravery and a chest full of “I am not dying today.”

Courage has never been a chameleon’s best attribute

 

and some days, it’s not mine either. I was mentored by black men

with brown skin who turned yellow at the sight of bellies

 

swollen with half their DNA. I was taught that a woman’s vagina

is just an underground railroad to masculinity, that real men

 

have tunnel vision and treat girls like subway cars,

like nothing more than a space to parallel park our genitals,

 

a hole to bury seeds and leave orchards in our rear-view mirrors.

They say you have to peel a woman like a tangerine

 

and your job as a man is to chameleon yourself into her trees,

bite a piece of her fruit and leave the rest hanging

 

crooked and confused. This is an apology to every woman

I changed colors just to get inside of.

 

I still haven’t stumbled across a definition of a man,

but I know that we are hotels that stand a million war stories tall.

 

I know that we carry guitar cases full of phobias

hoping we can turn fear into our strongest instrument,

 

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.

 

This next one is all about religion and bigotry, and is honestly the most accurate description of MAGA religion I have ever heard. They truly are praying to their own shadow, standing in front of a mirror. If there is a summary of why I left organized religion nearly a decade ago, this sums it up. 

 

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  watches FOX news,

 

Dog the Bounty Hunter, voted for Donald Trump,

 and loves Bill O’Reilly. I bet your God 

is a politician from 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.

 

So many great lines in there. What Francisco does - that needs to be done - indeed shouted from the rooftops - is that all of these things are connected. Racism, sexism, anti-LGBTQ bigotry, violence, wilful stupidity, rape culture, and narcissism. It’s all part of the same disease of the soul, and when you see one symptom, chances are the others are present too. 

 

I should also mention that this version of the poem, from the book, is a bit different from the original. In particular, a reference to John McCain was changed to Trump. Which obviously works better, although the original context was white bigots voting against the black guy, which I remember all too well from certain former friends from our former church.

 

I decided not to quote all of “Adrenaline Rush,” which is about police racism, but there are a few lines that I will highlight. The basic idea is that black me don’t need the adrenaline rush of extreme sports, because daily life gives them too much of that already. 

 

For example, in describing the cop who pulled him over at age 18:

 

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. 

 

And this one:

 

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 this badass statement:

 

Jim Crow may have left the nest,

but our streets are still covered with its feathers.

 

Finally, I want to quote a short poem that is excellent in its brief summary of the evil that still plagues our nation. 

 

Margin

 

To be marginalized in America

is to be a star on the face of midnight.

 

We constantly have to rise above everything

and shine our brightest

 

when it’s dark outside.

 

Good words for our time in history. 

 

Another long poem that I decided was a bit much to quote is “Rifle II,” which starts off talking about guns in America (and which make their way to Mexico), then turns to a sculpture that turns confiscated guns into art, before eventually tying it together with a look at how masculinity and violence have become unfortunately conflated in our culture. Again, a few lines are worth noting.

 

A bunch of dudes afraid of their own feelings, 

terrified of any emotion other than anger,

yelling at the shadows on the wall,

but still haven’t realized

that we’re the ones standing in front of the light.

 

Isn’t that the manosphere to a T? And the way testerical idiots like Kegsbreath bludgeon their way through life, destroying everything in their path? 

 

How about this for an inspirational passage near the end?

 

I am learning that this body is not a shotgun.

I am learning that this body is not a pistol.

I am learning that a man is not defined 

by what he can destroy.

 

I am learning that a person

who only knows how to fight

can only communicate in violence

and that shouldn’t be anyone’s first language.

 

There is another poem in this book that references another poet I discovered in the last five years, Nikki Giovanni. Francisco’s response is both a reply and an affirmation of Giovanni’s underlying idea. 

 

I should also mention that the only spiders I intentionally kill are black widows that have taken up residence in a place where little kids might put their hands. We don’t even bother to relocate jumping spiders - when my kids were little, they named them and considered them pets.

 

Here is the Nikki Giovanni original:

 

Allowables

 

I killed a spider
Not a murderous brown recluse
Nor even a black widow
And if the truth were told this
Was only a small
Sort of papery spider
Who should have run
When I picked up the book
But she didn’t
And she scared me
And I smashed her

 

I don’t think
I’m allowed

 

To kill something

 

Because I am

 

Frightened

 

And here is the Francisco response. 

 

Mercy

 

She asks me to kill the spider.

Instead, I get the most

peaceful weapons I can find.

 

I take a cup and a napkin.

I catch the spider, put it outside

and allow it to walk away.

 

If I am ever caught in the wrong place 

at the wrong time, just being alive

and not bothering anyone,

 

I hope I am greeted

with the same kind

of mercy.

 

Something I wish MAGA would think about. As Shakespeare put it:

 

For other ruffians, as their fancies wrought,

With self same hand, self reasons, and self right,

Would shark on you, and men like ravenous fishes

Would feed on one another.

 

I’ll end with a more lighthearted poem. The holidays are coming up rapidly, and, as readers know, they are difficult for me because of the trajectory of my birth family. This year, we are hosting, and opening our home to those of our kids’ friends who need a safe and affirming place to be. I know I cannot have back the joy of extended family the way it was pre-Trump, but my hope is that my kids can at least have that joy from our own holidays.

 

Cookout

 

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 foold

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.

 

That’s what I’m talking about. Although at our family gatherings, we are so paranoid of running out of food that we overdo it, and have leftovers coming out of our ears for the next two weeks. 

 

Those are my favorites from this excellent collection. I encourage lovers of poetry to give Rudy Francisco a try.