Crumbling Of An Empire

Remember baseball cards?
What the crap happened to them?
Internet…
1999—there was a card shop
hobby shop, comic shop on every corner.
Now? I have to go 5 towns over just to find one.
And it’s small,
Really small,
So small I can’t get by the fat guy in the superman sweater
On my way to the batman rack.
I don’t mind so much, because I know that’s the only
Rack he’s ever going to touch.
But where do you buy cards now?
Target? Walmart?
That’s no fun!
My dad owned a card shop back when
Yu-Gi-Oh Nerds
Starwars Customizable Card kiddos
And Magic The Gathering Gatherers
Would throw away their allowance,
birthday, and Christmas money
In exchange for small pieces of cardboard.
I was never that stupid
I got them for cost!
Cuz my dad owned the store!
I’d buy whole boxes
Sort them out and ran a side business
during my lunch hour!
In elementary school I’d trade them for twinkies
By high school I got cold-hard-cash!
I would convince these kids that a 50 cent
card was worth 5 dollars! And this was before the internet!
What did they know!?
I’d forge autographs to jack up the price
I bought my first car
cause of my clever con-artistry.
And now, my empire has crumbled.
No one wants cards anymore
They want facebook credits
And instant downloads
I can’t get those wholesale!
And even if I could, they’d have no resale value whatsoever.
And you can’t forge an autograph on a fart app for your I-phone.
You’ve ruined my personal economy Internet.
You ruined it!
Now I gotta get a job…