Cardboard boxes proliferate
all across the empty room
awash with acid sunlight.

Every ending is a new
beginning, every conclusion
a fresh start, a blank slate.

All that serrated packing tape
signifies something more than back
strain and a change of address form.

The long-running, much-celebrated show
turned out not to be a metaphor
for climate change, feminist empowerment
or anything anyone at all hoped for really.

The show turned out to be just a symbol for itself,
for failed institutions, institutional disappointments,
a theme mined by a much better HBO program
that ended its run years and years and years ago.

Viewers were up in arms everywhere over errant
character arcs, unearned twists, abandoned storylines,
forsaken backstories, squandered character development,
the burning detritus of lazy writing atop a pile of false promises.

Every institution fails you in the end.
In the end, no matter how much it seems like a marble pillar
or Valyrian steel forged in a furnace of dragonfire,
every institution ultimately fails you in the end.

Long lines at midnight, breathless hype,
shiny sheen, the high gloss of marketing,
cosplay and balletic spoiler avoidance,
slammed multiplexes, overloaded ticket sites,
Croesus-like CGI kissing earnest steady-cam shots,
fan service, callbacks, countless punches.

Childhood idols fleshed out
on the grandeur of the silver screen,
writers room noodling netting billions
long after all the shaggy boho creatives
that originated it all were lowered
into the loamy maw of anonymous grave plots.

There's a degree of validation for the pasty
and hopeless, the low and lowdown
in watching a distinguished professional legend
pretending to be Bartoc the frickin Leaper
as though it's not silly, as though all
your idle moments, all your random diversions
really matter in the end, as though it all ties up
with a master-planned through-line of purpose,

as though it all mattered when you avidly read
about Iron Man, Hercules and Giant Man punching
out the red-shirt Skrulls (or was it the Krees?) on some spaceship
for a few minutes back at your grandmother's house
back before she was dead, before you were consumed
with the caustic sting of bitterness and bile, all the
accrued weight of a life generally but pleasantly wasted.

Bukowski penned drunken, *****, barroom poetry,
verse as rough as his leathery face, a visage chapped by hard living.

The idolized poet of the lost, the forgotten and misbegotten,
the drunkards, the damaged and the denizens of skid row,

recounted in an interview how he went to The Playwright bar
in Los Angeles, drinking there at least four or five times.

They eventually eighty-sixed him, kicked him to the curb
when he demanded to know if anyone there was a playwright,

accused them of false advertising, raised a veritable ruckus.
It was just another dive. Maybe he was being a little dramatic.

But maybe at the jagged edge, you need a little fire in your blood,
a willingness to throw down over matters of little consequence.

Some days, the words flow forth like the mighty Mississippi River.
Some days, they trickle like a creek.
Some days, drought ravages the barren land,
the word processor screen as blank as the expansive emptiness
of a sun-charred desert landscape.

The factories rust oxide red,
The parking lots sit cracked and empty.
The vacants molder and rot away.

Manufacturers flounder and fail.
Blue-collared workers flee to warmer climes.
Death stretches on, forever protracted.

Once-proud communities erode away slowly.
A seemingly rock-solid way of life is forever lost.
We used to make something, the forgotten lament.

We went to war.
We went to war.
We went to that godforsaken war.
We went to war as fair-cheeked boys
and came home as wizened old men.
We left behind the best of us
on that unforgiving battlefield
and never live down
our great needling guilt,
that all-consuming sense
it should have been us instead.
It should have been us instead.