How It Ends
“This is how the text exchange ends. / Not with an explicit farewell but with a two-day pause followed by a thumbs-up-emoji reaction,” writes Reuven Perlman in “How Other Things End” recently published in the New Yorker with an epigraph of T. S. Eliot’s famed last lines from “The Hollow Men.” “This is how the career ends. / Not with a retirement party and a gold watch but with a second career in the gig economy.” Taking inspiration from Perlman’s comedic perspective of dark times, write a humorous poem that consists of your own inventions of anticlimactic contemporary situations in which the outcome is a letdown, with more of a fizzle than a gratifying conclusion. What modern references would you include to put your own stamp on this concluding episode?
