If you drop a bowl of cereal,
Fling its contents out,
Some of the Cheerios will be flung so far
They get lost in the corners.
Other Cheerios will stay closer to the bowl;
They are clustered, thick, on top of each other in a pile,
As you move away from the remains of the bowl on the ground, the cereal diffuses, spreading;
It thins out the farther you go.
Despite this pattern, there is a lot of variation within the diffusion:
Slung out by the bowl’s collision or swept about by a broom,
some of the Cheerios that stay close to each other and their bowl are piled thick,
others bump into each other,
still others never hear from each other once they drift away
(even if they are a short distance apart).
The same goes for the Cheerios that are sent farther;
distance from starting place mingles with other variables
to create endless configurations.
In a corner,
In a room adjacent to the one covered by shards of bowl and bits of cereal,
A lonely Cheerio, a bit dented,
Meets a bowtie pasta
Lying where it fell at the edge of the pasta sprawled across the floor
Flung out from the bag that was dropped.