My mind is a long
junk drawer
littered with old,
strange gismos,
as well as things of the new

The youngest of its contents;
the most recently added
is to the front and organized
(mostly)

The eldest of my junk
lies tucked in a jumbled tangle
way, way back there
in the dark
like an old, abandoned cobweb—
dusty and in dirty
grey wads
Some of it’s completely hidden;
crammed under the grimy, peeled-up contact paper liner;
forgotten.
While sometimes it’s just too dark
Too dark to see it all,
to tell exactly what it is.

I think there’s a hole
in the very back;
the blackest corner,
where objects fall out;
memories escape my grasp
and sometimes I have no clue
(hopefully those things
weren’t valuable)

Sometimes I feel like
I’ve collected too much stuff;
like I’ve hoarded too much information
But I know there’s more space in there
somewhere…
Why can’t we humans find it?

And sometimes
the winter-sad rain of reality
swoops in like an unexpected storm,
drenching my drawer’s content,
warping and saturating them,
making them
different.

Perhaps the most important
belonging in my drawer
is my telescope.
I can use it to look
outside of my drawer
to see the vast, mysterious
outer world.
I take in
what it enables me to see
and make it my own

but my telescope only works
if my drawer is open