Complete Semen Study

morphology: pinheads": two per cent

Laborious, stump, droopy askew, blundering into the microscopic equivalent of paths of busses as the healthiest sperm zips by like the varsity water polo team on their way to a party with the best-looking cheerleadersunbeautiful losers, unfittest and unmourned, o my five-hundred-thousand-or-so pinheads floundering in this plastic cup's murky bottom, what would you do to be half of someone? Wank it sitting on the toilet in a fluorescent pea-green hospital bathroom while learning to juggle one-handed one cup and three brown-bagged Penthouses offered by the deadpan female lab attendant? You'd wank it anyplace, I think. They'd tie your wrists if you had wrists to stop your rubbing off on fireplugs and brick buildings, much less on a hand's elastic flesh you're too dim to recognize is your own. You're the ones who can't be taken to church because you hump the scarlet pew cushions while the rest of us are praying, and try to straddle the priest's leg like a puppy while he exchanges an inspirational personal word or two with each of his congregation as they file from the service. I, on the other hand, am too mature for this. The Pet-of-the-Month could almost be my granddaughter. My metabolism has decelerated to that of an elderly Galapagos Tortoise. I could do very well all day sunning myself under a thick, warm shell, and could easily take the next century to burn the calories in a slice of pizza. In the world for which my body was designed I would have checked out long ago,

immolated at the ritual bonfire by my two hundred great grandchildren roasting a whole mammoth in my honor, dancing for days stoned on sacred leaf-juice, and intermarrying like howler monkeys in the bushes. It's no doubt due to nights like this that you weakened and malformed and chase your own watery tails until you decompose into what the complete semen study classifies as "debris." The doctors say it's age or car exhaust or groundwater toxins or they-don't-know-what, but there must have been a boy waiting for the dopey old patriarch to die so he could do his sister when she was stoned out of her cheesewhiz, sweaty and writhing in the firelight. If their child, slow-witted and guileless, showed the endearing but useless gift to greet everyone's spirit no matter their status, they might have thrown him the bones the dogs had finished with,' which is how they fed the shunned and the shamed, unbeautiful losers, unfittest and unmourned, o my five-hundred-thousand-or-so pinheads floundering in this plastic cup's murky bottom I hereby hand over for removal and disposal to the now-surgically-gloved deadpan female lab attendant.

Copyright World Poetry, Incorporated May/Jun 1999
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