What is the main conflict in It's like This by Stephen Dobyns?

“It's like This,” originally published in 1980 (and collected in 1994 in Velocities: New and Selected Poems, 1966-1992), is a not-so-pleasant look into the not-so-inspiring life of some undefined everyman. Even if it is taken on a metaphoric level, the outlook as espoused by Stephen Dobyns's poem is not good. There is existential angst lingering here, to which almost everyone can relate at various times in a lifetime—those moments when everything seems to be going wrong or, worse yet, when nothing seems to be happening or, even worse than that—as in this poem—when something is going on but it is difficult to express it and no one else seems to care.