How does Dobyns address the theme of existence in the poem, It’s like This?

What is existence? this poem seems to be asking. Is it one's identity? If so, what does that mean? What is identity if everyone sees a person as someone that he or she is not? Should one conform to what others think, even if those definitions do not in any way match one's self-definition? Why do those definitions differ so widely?

These are a few of the basic questions about existence that this poem seems to be asking. Is existence language? What happens when one tries to speak but becomes so frustrated in trying to explain oneself that nothing comes out? Try as one might to grasp the meaning of life, it is always somewhere out of reach. The closest the man in the poem comes to touching something real in this life is a chance meeting with a stranger who will shortly leave. The man in this poem tries many different ways to relate to existence or to understand it, but it constantly eludes him. It becomes, in the end, not much more than waking up in a world in which no one knows him and no one really cares. Even if he did figure it all out, darkness (death) will eventually call him, and everything or anything that he has claimed as his existence will be washed, like water, down the drain.