Two Poems

Sex Lives From behind, I put the cloth with chloroform over her face. struggles only a minute--she is so small--and then I lift her into the van and shut the doors. When I wake I am not in a sweat, it is not that real, it just unsettled my history.  I have been watching too much media screams, implantation of acts.  Am I the man with the cloth or the girl unconscious in the van? I think I could do it, or think about if I could do it, wondering how one does it, how the thought becomes act, a human an object. But does thinking make it so? Does thinking the imaginary moment make it real? The images from movies invade my inner-sanctum. The Buddhist might say, the thought becomes word, the word becomes act, the act become who we are. So is the thought mine or an invasion of bad culture? I dream at night of saving the man from the act of sex by telling him he is only there on impulse, an animal thing that means nothing, really, the old in-and-out. Dreams are not the realm of possibilities, but the dark matter of other lives, the ones that exist only because we see them out there, floating before us, everyone’s face. The man opens the van doors and gently lifts her out. She recovers in his arms, breathing slowly again, afraid. He sets her on the curb and with his cell phone, calls the police.   On the Death of Other People They are always going, coming and going, into and out of, always there in the rearview mirror or a passing flash of recognition along the side of a road. They treat you like you were special, awkwardly so, and like your heart was just another organ, a plump little cherry in the middle of their solar system. The effect is always like after a storm, the wheat fields flattened, the fence torn up, and the windows echoing an ancient rattle. They take a piece of fleshy something with them, some living that leaves its hole, a space you are left to inhabit, the air above their quiet ground. But worst of all they die before you, sucking out the world into a point, a singularity, questionable quantum interface, drinking your blood to keep their memory alive.