Page 29 - The Irony Board

Into the Mind

Top drawer
In a warped
Cabinet
Stuck for years
Suddenly
Pulls out.

The blockage symbolized in the preceding piece need not be
permanent. Why and when it gets released are not always easy
questions to answer: unforeseen stimuli can do the job just as
effectively as long bouts of therapy. Whatever the cause, the effect
may be swift and even over-compensatory.
In this piece, the filing cabinet represents the totality of mental
storage; its top drawer, as the idiom implies, contains information of
great importance. The warped cabinet stands for a warped
personality, one in which issues of high priority cannot be properly
stored and retrieved. A change in humidity, the depredations of
termites, or an unusually forceful yank on the handle unexpectedly
open that drawer; missing the usual resistance, it goes sailing across
the room (like the poem’s first line), spilling its contents. This
phenomenon resembles the behavior of a person abruptly released
from some inner bondage.

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