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See YouTube video of Janet Kuypers performing her Periodic Table bonus poem Potassium Chloride live 11/19/14 at Chicago’s open mic the Café Gallery (Canon)

See YouTube video of Janet Kuypers performing her Periodic Table bonus poem Potassium Chloride live 11/19/14 at Chicago’s open mic the Café Gallery (Sony, Edge Det. filter)

See YouTube video of Janet Kuypers’ 2 poems Arsenic and Syphilis & Juxtaposition, or Irony? from memory; then she read her 2 Periodic Table poems Potassium Chloride and Thallium at Georgetown’s Poetry Plus open mic at Cianfrani’s 2/26/16 (w/ a Cps).

See YouTube video of Janet Kuypers’ 2 poems Arsenic and Syphilis & Juxtaposition, or Irony? from memory; then she read her 2 Periodic Table poems Potassium Chloride and Thallium at Georgetown’s Poetry Plus open mic at Cianfrani’s 2/26/16 (w/ a Nikon).

Potassium Chloride Janet Kuypers (bonus poem from the “Periodic Table of Poetry” series, based on Potassium, #19, K) 10/25/14 Once worked for a company who stopped selling their drugs to state correctional facilities who used them in cocktails to kill their prisoners. The company didn’t have the moral issue — but religious and political groups did, and companies couldn’t justify selling drugs as sedatives to hospitals when those same drugs were used to kill people. Then I learned that in the cocktail, pentobarbital was the sedative, pavulon was the paralytic agent, and Potassium Chloride killed them. So I instantly remembered that us humans need Potassium, but nobody will sell supplements because too much Potassium could easily kill a person. So, too much of an element that we need for life can kill us. Fascinating. But it’s not straight Potassium that they use in lethal injections, it’s Potassium Chloride — so I wondered, but why is it not just straight Potassium? That’s when I heard that if you take Potassium straight it would burn, so they use this metal halide of Potassium with chlorine. How nice of them, because it would be cruel if prisoners were in pain before we killed them. That would be cruel of us. # More than a decade after my state imposed a moratorium on executions, then the death penalty was abolished. And I know the death penalty costs us taxpayers much more money than keeping prisoners alive for life. The death penalty’s not a deterrent, and the death penalty does take innocent lives from wrongful convictions. But all that’s stuck in my head right now is the Potassium Chloride, things our body needs, to kills us. I reflect on the late-night leg cramps because we don’t get enough Potassium. Chloride’s needed for metabolism, and Potassium’s one of the most important electrolytes in our body. Still, too much of it can kill us. It must, somehow, makes sense that we humans take these elements and use them as an instrument of death. I’m afraid I know how us humans think, so, of course. It makes perfect sense.

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