white room

You're left stagnating, vegetating,
sitting cross-legged on
a white, linoleum floor.
Knocking knees together,
why move? Why bother?
You can't work up initiative,
cannot desire change.
You don't fight through the days,
and will not shift the legs that have
no muscles left to move them.
Instead you'll sit, glued to the floor,
in premature, perpetual mourning.

The sun will continue to weave its way
across that vacant space,
flowing bland than thin through some
slit of a window in the south wall.
Some days you'll stand, walk around,
explore a new cubic centimetre of space
inside your cell, your lot in life,
your preordained, divinely conceived
white room.

Some days you don't.

And after years of up and down,
of pounding heart-fevers and hunger pains,
of wanting, denying, and linoleum floors,
You'll find there are still no answers.
But yours is the choice to stand, or to sit,
to act in full knowledge of the simple fact
that we are preordained only to die.