Where sperm goes.
by Jason Nelson
Sitting on the orange carpet, in the main hallway, just past apartment
number three hundred and eight-four, were three small, or not so small,
things. I know thing is a very general word, but then words have
relatives, and they always live longer than they should. Maybe longer
isn’t the right way to put it, because it is a complex noun. And
complexity isn’t linear. I suppose this might account for the way water
separates and then links and then separates. I suppose. But remember
these are small things, and things become linear when they get small.
What happens when things get large, you ask with a frothy mouth and
leaky hands? I’m not quite sure, except that when you plant a tree or
bush or a sloppy kiss, things grow, and growing takes up more space.
Too Much Television
You can’t dodge them all. There are too many of them coming at you, and
at such great velocities. You will fail. Oh, I know you’ll fail. Sure
if you flex your knees and keep your eyes fixed close on the first few,
you might juke and dive your way through five or ten minutes. But these
are high and fancy things, with happy edges that focus on each move.
They miss, only at first to study your head’s desires and the way your
brain commands along lines through nerves and joints and muscles. Even
if after fifteen minutes you still stand on the sweaty gym floor
panting and grunting names from long ago times, these things have
discovered what makes you so much like the other ten million categories
of you. Each pass now they come closer to glancing a shoulder or
clipping your chest. And each pass they learn, even before you learn,
about your concepts of time and love and church and bizarre wood
sculptors. By the rarest chance twenty minutes might be signaled by some
incremental movements by hands and dials and springs and token bursts
of electricity. And when this one third of an hour comes, they will be
stealing your breath with every toss, and drinking sight from the
sockets that you need to fumble through casinos in search of small chips and
full grain leather. And when the moment passes, when clocks run closer
to rhythms or a question, and when room and space do not belong, the
balls won’t feel the miss.