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"Career" weighs a life in poetry against humbler professions and concludes that the fight for meaning mattered even if the lost fun could never have saved the ruined world.

The speaker does not fully repent ambition, but he no longer disguises its cost. What keeps the poem alive is the hard turn toward poetry as labor and combat rather than prestige. The final lines make private enjoyment seem trivial beside collapse, which gives the page its exhausted conviction.

Career: thought I was better than a jukebox salesman and a small college basketball coach, so went beyond. Fight like hell for the fun you would have had, would not have done any good anyway with the world being gone.