the things they did to you 2005

When you hear that you were so close to death (because they have to tell you, you don’t know your own life in moments like that and you have to rely only on what other people tell you), you don’t think about it, but 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, what am I saying, over a week or a week and a half, 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 from. 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. That had a brain activity/pressure circulation detector surgically attached to your head, they call is an intercranial pressure monitor, 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 information.
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 planter, what if you were not alive? Would anyone miss you? Would anyone write poems about you, or cry for you?
Yeah, people cry, maybe you’d pull at their heart strings for weeks, but people would 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. Even your soul would be angry, and every living poerson would just forget you. That doesn’t go away. It never does. Get used to it.

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Chicago Poet Janet Kuypers
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