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the poetry 2 CD setCHAOTIC ELEMENTS
Order this iTunes track: Janet Kuypers - The Chaotic Collection #01-05 - A Woman Talking About Her Rapist Friend
from the Chaotic Collection

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CD: Janet Kuypers - Chaotic Elements
Listen mp3 file to the DMJ Art Connection,
off the CD Indian Flux
Listen: (2:56) mp3 file
to this recording from
Fusion
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live at the Winking Lizard in Ohio 10/10/08
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live at the Café in Chicago 07/20/10
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of the intro 2 the open mic @ the Café in Chicago 07/20/10, w/ Kuypers reading this poem & the Julie Kovacs cc&d poem “When Daddy Comes Around”
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12/04/10 from the TV camera in Lake Villa at Swing State, live in her show the Stories of Women
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12/04/10 in Lake Villa at Swing State, live in her “Visual Nonsense” show the Stories of Women
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with this & more from the TV monitor in the the Stories of Women show, in Visual Nonsense, live in Lake Villa 12/04/10 at Swing State
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See the full show video of Kuypers reading this & more in the the Stories of Women show in in Visual Nonsense, live in Lake Villa 12/04/10 with this writing at Swing State (last line of last story cut off)
video video See YouTube video of Janet Kuypers’ 4 poems walking home from school, Hancock Suicide, Chicago, December 1994, a woman talking about her rapist friend and Last Before Extinction at Elizabeth’s Crazy Little Thing (with a “darkness” theme) in Wicker Park, Chicago (Canon fs200)
video video See YouTube video of Janet Kuypers’ 4 poems walking home from school, Hancock Suicide, Chicago, December 1994, a woman talking about her rapist friend and Last Before Extinction at Elizabeth’s Crazy Little Thing (with a “darkness” theme) in Wicker Park, Chicago (Canon Power Shot)
video See YouTube video of Janet Kuypers reading her poems “Coslow’s”, “a woman talking about her rapist friend” and “Left with a Hole” from her book “Rape, Sexism Life & Death” at Georgetown’s “Poetry Aloud” open mic 1/13/18 (this video was filmed from a Panasonic Lumix 2500 camera; posted on Facebook, Twitter, Linkedin, Pinterest, Instagram, and Tumblr).
video See YouTube video of Janet Kuypers reading her poems “Coslow’s”, “a woman talking about her rapist friend” and “Left with a Hole” from her book “Rape, Sexism Life & Death” at Georgetown’s “Poetry Aloud” open mic 1/13/18 (this video was filmed from a Panasonic Lumix T56 camera; posted on Facebook, Twitter, Linkedin, Pinterest, Instagram, and Tumblr).
video Enjoy this YouTube video of Janet Kuypers reading her poems “A Woman Talking About Her Rapist Friend”, “Emphatic One”, and “Quenching Anybody’s Thirst” from the book “Shattering the Glass Ceiling” to close her “Poetic License 7/2/23 global open mic” through a Zoom meeting and a Facebook event page (this video was filmed from a Panasonic Lumix 2500 camera; on Facebook, Twitter, Linkedin, Pinterest, Instagram, and Tumblr).
video Also enjoy this as a Facebook live video stream from a Samsung S9 camera; on Facebook, Twitter, Linkedin, Instagram, and Tumblr. #janetkuypers #janetkuyperspoetry #janetkuypersbookreading #janetkuyperspoeticlicense

a woman talking
about her rapist friend

He was my friend, and we had been
through a lot together, our psychological
ups and downs,

but he mixed drinks exceptionally well
at his college frat parties, and his
ice-blue eyes

always spoke the truth to me. It’s amazing
to think that the only reason we ever met
was because one day

he wore a turtleneck that prefectly
matched his eyes, and I had to tell him.
I don’t know why

he put up with my mood swings, with my
self-destructive social life and man-hating,
normally he didn’t

care about women, never gave their opinions
much thought, just tried to get them
drunk at parties,

maybe he knew that and that’s why he
listened to me. Then for a few years
our friendship

drifted, we didn’t see each other much,
I heard through the grapevine that he was
failing in school.

Then one day, out of the blue, he comes
over and he has two black eyes. And he
says to me

that when he was in the parking garage
two guys came and beat him up, and one
of them said,

you raped my girlfriend. And then he looked
at me and said, and you know, looking back,
he was right.

I raped her. And I know he wanted sym-
pathy, he wanted to hear me say something,
but I couldn’t.

And he said, I know this has to be hard for
you to hear, but I wanted to tell you. I know
it was wrong.

A part of me wanted to hate him. A part of
me thought that if he was my friend I would
be condoning

what he did. And a part of me thought that
our friendship made him realize what he
actually had done.

I tried to be there for him. I wasn’t much
good at it. Eventually, he moved away.
I didn’t try

to lose touch with him. But it’s just that a
part of me is still trying to figure out if I
can be his friend.

Sometimes you just lose touch with some-
one, sometimes that’s all you can do.


Copyright Janet Kuypers.
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