"Junk Drawer"

Revised...


I saved a couple coals from a significant fire. Some unusable keys
remain on photo keychains, freebies from Las Vegas weekends
long past.
Boxing gloves rest on top with “HITMAN” written on them in
Sharpie.
The gloves float
on old journals, several tarot decks, a box stuffed with at least
a thousand fortunes from cookies,
some mushroom-shaped ceramic stands, a banana-shaped pipe
for pot—
I have two cubic feet of such things, each with an invitation to
wait here.
Even the motes
settled into the bin’s bottom corners
have their stories.
This is what I call a junk drawer.
The one near the kitchen is the utility drawer with its markers,
tools, pushpins, flashlight, scratch paper and keys.
The keys are the telling detail: those in the junk drawer have lost
their doors.
I don’t know why they’re still around. This may mean
it’s time for the ritual. With a junk drawer, you have to visit
every so often, recommit to the objects you’ll keep.
You have to adjust
the collection you retain to guard your secret identity.
With a trashcan on hand, you redraw the boundaries around
those miscellaneous matters of trust.
Maybe some you save for your son or granddaughter.
It’s poem-like, how you must
decide what to abandon and which things to contain in their rust