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from Hydrogen to Nothing Janet Kuypers from the “Periodic Table of Poetry” series, based on “Now you’re Nothing to me”, written 5/12/08 - 5/14/08 this poem written 3/4/13 - 3/6/12 Love is like tap water, free flowing... Remember when you were little, just put a glass under the faucet and quench your thirst? Wait a minute, it’s not like that. Water isn’t free. You even have to pay for the water in your own home, and it’s not even clean. What you’re getting is dirty. And you still have to pay for it. # You know, they say us humans are like seventy percent water. And when I think of you, and all the time we were together — well, if you’re seventy percent water, I have to remember that it wasn’t pure and clean with you. If this was love; if this was you — it wasn’t free. I’m still paying for it. # I mean, they say we’re mostly made of water, Hydrogen, oxygen... But it’s like you were an electron from Hydrogen to me, one electron, spinning around the center of me, always keeping an all too tight grip on me. I would think I was free, and there you would be, that one presence I could never get rid of. You were spinning, orbiting, spinning my head... You were keeping your distance, but still, you made sure you were always there, holding me down. If we’re mostly made of water, and you spun around me like in that Hydrogen atom, you kept me gasping for air. I needed that oxygen... I know water is Hydrogen and oxygen, I know I’ve got it in me, I’ve just got to keep myself together after dealing with what you’ve done to me. # When we’re seventy percent water, by mass we’re only eleven percent Hydrogen. So most of the mass in our body may be oxygen... But by an atomic percentage we’re sixty-seven percent Hydrogen, meaning most of the atoms in our bodies are Hydrogen. Just one electron, spinning around that nucleus, just spinning, and never letting go. # When I now think of you, and the fact that you made me feel like nothing — well, I think of what you’re made of, and I have to remember: we’re all made of atoms, protons and neutrons, infinitely small, wound tightly together in the nucleus surrounded at a comparatively vast distance by occasional, tiny, orbiting electrons. So when I think of you I have to remember that you’re made of those atoms with really tiny cores — and those atoms are filled with so much space that you’re mostly made of nothing. When I think of you, I remind myself of this. When I think of the nothingness you made me feel, and the fact that you should mean nothing to me, this is how I must think of you.

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Like Janet Kuypers’ writing on any of these links below:

Watch this Youtube video of this poem read live outdoors at the Lincoln Park Zoo for the 2013 Poetry Bomb 4/28/13 (Kodak)

Watch this Youtube video of this poem read live outdoors at the Lincoln Park Zoo for the 2013 Poetry Bomb 4/28/13 (Samsung)

See the Samsung video upside-down, all raw video currently posted at facebook, posted immediately after poetry was read during the 2013 Poetry Bomb

Download this in a free 7/28/13 chapbook the Lincoln Park Zoo chapbook, w/ the Periodic Table of Poetry poems.

See YouTube video of Kuypers reading the poem from Hydrogen to Nothing live 5/29/13 at the Café Gallery in Chicago (Canon) with 2011 Hotel music “playing with blocks and whotnot” by the HA!Man of South Africa

See YouTube video of Kuypers reading the poem from Hydrogen to Nothing live 5/29/13 at the Café Gallery in Chicago (Sony) with 2011 Hotel music “playing with blocks and whotnot” by the HA!Man of South Africa

See YouTube video of Kuypers hosting the open mic 5/29/13 at Gallery Cabaret’s the Café Gallery in Chicago - and performing this poem

See YouTube video of Janet Kuypers reading her poem from Hydrogen to Nothing live 6/26/13 at the open mic the Café Gallery in Chicago (Sony)

See YouTube video of Janet Kuypers reading her poem from Hydrogen to Nothing live 6/26/13 at the open mic the Café Gallery in Chicago (Canon)

See YouTube video of Kuypers hosting the open mic 6/26/13 at Gallery Cabaret’s the Café Gallery in Chicago — and reading this poem