This poem got me thinking how to explain the blackness of depression to someone who has never experienced it. Picture the most tedious and unpleasant task you might ever have to do. Cleaning toilets? Picking trash? Burying dead animals? Now imagine that's your job eight hours a day. Next, picture television, movies, music, video games, all forms of entertainment gone from your life. And all recreation too. You do nothing but stay in a bare unpainted concrete room. No other form of pleasure is possible either. The only food you get is the most bland imaginable. Maybe oatmeal with no salt, sugar or flavoring, three meals a day every day. Oh, and every night your sleep is disturbed, so you feel tired every day. And you're always feeling aches and pains all over your body. And something terrible has happened in your life. Perhaps someone very close to you has died or has cut off all contact with you. Finally, you see no way out of this miserable existence, no other future, just more of the same. Suicide seems the only way out. How would you feel to be stuck in this situation?