than the drawer where
you used to store your opium?
How like a black-eyed susan
blinded into ordinary daisy
is my pretty kitchen drawer!
How like a nose sans nostrils
is my bare wooden drawer!
How like an eggless basket!
How like a pool sans tortoise!
My hand has explored
my drawer like a rat
in an experiment of mazes.
Reader, I may safely say
there's not an emptier drawer
in all of Christendom!
-Leonard Cohen
Following my school's prom (a marvelous, if quintessentially high-school, experience), I traveled to New York with a dear friend. It was needless to say a marvelous time, as we had a knack for finding ridiculously cool cheap thing after ridiculously cool cheap thing, from street fairs with edible flowers to five-dollar underground improv. As a result my head is exploding with impressions, so fodder for blog posts is secured for a bit. This poem is from the Selected Poems of Leonard Cohen from 1956-1968, which I found outside the Strand selling for a dollar. This was the first page I opened to, and I must say I found the poet's plight rather funny, which only goes to show what a callous and unfeeling person I am.
Leonard Cohen, yet another man I would totally go for if only he lived in my era...
