I have one friend who lined his rec room with fine wooden panels -- real planks. It gives the room a rich, warm feeling, of comfort and being supported by authentic richness of spirit.

And, I know another guy, from a different part of the country and a different economic class, who lined his rec room with those vinyl sheets that are printed with images of wood grain and get tacked up onto furring strips. It makes the rec room seem brown but shallow, sort of...kind of a tacky poor muzzy imitation of the real thing.

A real poem, filtered through a global search and replace to change the nouns, is kind of like that vinyl-clad rec room, ya know what I mean? -- almost the right color, but a certain quality short.

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