The Friend Zone, and the Pain of Resignation Therein

Flicking through stained pages of some battered, discarded Metro at 8am
When tales of fires and floods and frenzies just leave us jaded
And dietary dissertations simply leave us cold,
Raising dormant fiery rebellion ["Fuck it, I'll eat eggs if I want."],
There are those superfluous snippets and column-inch-fillers:
Those peculiar useless experiments that beg the question,
Is this the peak of seven years' intensive study and the fruits
of a hard-earned PhD?
One pities these whey-faced dungeon-masters whose mission to cure cancer
Culminates in rat-back-ears, gambling gibbons and that age-old classic:
The side on which a slice of buttered toast crashes to the ground.
For how many hours did pasty bespectacled Neil stand alone,
Cramming, popping and buttering slice after slice of mouldy Hovis?
Arm cramping and fingers blistering,
That acne-worn brow soaked in perspiration as he desperately drags the sterile knife
Across the precision-cut bread:
Scrape, scrape, scrape, scrape-
Only to let it fall to the linoleum floor after a hundred previous tests
With a hundred more to go.
He makes breakfast all day but he never will eat it,
But tells himself that it will all be the worth the while one day
When he stands and collects his well-deserved Nobel Prize-
Then it falls down butter-side, and he starts his work again.
Each time a faint hope flickers behind those weary eyes that this time,
Perhaps, the monotony will be relieved by one rogue slice
That instead of cleaving to gravity's rule will leap from his hand
And throw itself the other way around, if it won't hover in the air.
So far, no such quirk or force or God has gifted such a miracle,
And he returns once again to the unforgiving apparatus.
What induces these tortured souls to go through such self-destruction?
Why keep pursuing such inevitable answers and chasing futile truths?
A pointless thankless endless task just brings Neil here again
Never seeing one mouthful of that hot freshly-buttered toast.