I sprint.
Hoping to live.
Or at least pretend to live.
Feel like I live.
But I don't get anywhere with it.
It's as if I make progress when I am awake,
only to be put back to the beginning while I sleep.
This is cruelty.
Designed not only to break me,
but to leave me a hopeless husk, shriveled on the floor,
the desire to run erased.
I vowed I wouldn't run your mazes.
I vowed I wouldn't move when you rang that bell.
Vowed I wouldn't be your pet, in a box made to choose for me.
Yet, I have landed here anyways.
I escaped. 
I tasted sweet freedom.
Pain may come with freedom, but it is a small price in comparison to this.
I don't belong here.
I'm not cut out to be your mouse.
I run these cooridors, hoping to find my out.
But I am realizing, there is no exit this time.
I haven't been given one.
I may get a weekend pass.
But I will never be free again.
My soul dies.
I used to get a bit of attention for running.
A treat.
A token.
And if I did well, I was stroked in a gentle, loving manner.
Now, I run, and no treats.
No attention.
More demands.
Less love.
Wait, what love?
Less is the wrong word.
Less gives the impression that there is some.
I am but a dried up husk in more than one sense of the word.
I am offered that attention by outsiders when I am on my weekend passes.
But I turn them down.
I don't know what to do with my body anymore.
There is only one that I want.
Only one can make me feel.
Pain is better than feeling nothing at all, so the song says.
But to one like me, pain is glorious pleasure.
I recieve nothing, but dream of everything that the one will give me.
Everything that the one will soon bestow upon my lonely, unused body.
It keeps me running.
My hope may be dying, but there is one spark.
One will keep me searching for my permanent escape.
I will not be kept here forever.
You may think you have me sealed up tight,
but my one will touch me.
Hold me.
Make me feel.
Give me the affection that has lacked for so very very long in my life.
I ache to know what it will feel like to feel that again.
I remember so vaguely.
I find it in my dreams.
So, I will curl up on my floor, and enter that land that holds my one.
And when I dream, I will be warm, held, loved.
And I will awake, ready to face another day in this cold dark box....
awaiting my time with my one.
You cannot take that away from me.