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(2:17) read 12/07/10, live at the Café in Chicago
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live at Waiting 4 the Bus at Café Ballou in Chicago 08/01/11
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of 3 death-related poems (including this one) live at Waiting 4 the Bus at Café Ballou in Chicago 08/01/11
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of Janet Kuypers reading her poem The Things They Did To You live 9/18/13 at the open mic the Café Gallery in Chicago (C)
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of Janet Kuypers reading her poem The Things They Did To You live 9/18/13 at the open mic the Café Gallery in Chicago (S)
video See YouTube video of Janet Kuypers reading her poem The Things They Did To You live 1/6/16 at Rad Radam Open Stage in Austin, TX (this video was filmed from a Nikon Cool Pix S7000 camera; posted on Facebook, Twitter, Linkedin, Pinterest, Instagram, and Tumblr).
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of Janet Kuypers reading her poem The Things They Did To You live 1/6/16 at Rad Radam Open Stage in Austin TX (Canon Power Shot).
video video See YouTube video 7/8/16 of Janet Kuypers reading her poem The Things They Did To You, then sings her song What we Need in Life (with her poem Fantastic Car Crash inside) in the 2nd round at the Austin installment (at her house) of the Poetry Plus open mic 7/8/16 (filmed w/ a Canon Power Shot camera).
video video See YouTube video 7/8/16 of Janet Kuypers reading her poem The Things They Did To You, then sings her song What we Need in Life (with her poem Fantastic Car Crash inside) in the 2nd round at the Austin installment (at her house) of the Poetry Plus open mic 7/8/16 (filmed w/ a Sony camera).

The Things They Did To You

(written October 13, 1998; edited April 4, 2008)

when you hear that you were so close to death
you don’t think about it, you feel fine, you
couldn’t have been that bad. But you were on a
respirator to breathe for you while the doctors
just hoped and waited for you to start breathing
again. And you couldn’t eat, you were unconscious
for days, so they gave you food through a tube
that went straight to your stomach. You’ve got
the scar on your stomach to prove it, where
the tube came out of your body. There is a
piece of metal in your body that the doctors put
in there in case you had blood clots that tried
to move through your arteries to your heart or
lungs or brain. Granted, their being kind to place
that vena cava filter in your body now means
an MRI you might need in the future to help you
will only kill you with that vena cava metal filter
in your body, but they say they were doing
everything only in your best interest. They had an
intracranial pressure monitor surgically attached
to your head so they could measure if there was too
much pressure on your brain. Yeah, I suppose
it was fair to say that you almost died, but
you’re fine now. At least no one will tell you
that, but I’m sure you know that by now.

What does it feel like to be almost dead? If
you had to think about your own life, and what
it meant to you and to other generations, would
any of this surgery matter? Well, you wouldn’t
be dead, I guess. But what if you were no
longer here, on this planet, what if you were
not alive? Would anyone miss you? Would
anyone write poems about you, or cry for you?

Well, people might get used to the fact that you
were gone. Time heals all wounds, as they say.
You, if you were thinking about it after you were
gone, you’d still be angry, I’m sure. That
doesn’t go away. It never does. Get used to it.


Copyright Janet Kuypers.
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