Here is a true story cribbed from Andrew Solomon's The Noonday Demon: An Atlas of Depression:
I was fascinated to hear of the suicide of an octopus, trained for a circus, that had been accustomed to doing tricks for rewards of food. When the circus was disbanded, the octopus was kept in a tank and no one paid any attention to his tricks. He gradually lost color (octopuses' states of mind are expressed in their shifting hues) and finally went through his tricks one last time, failed to be rewarded, and used his beak to stab himself so badly that he died.
Your mission: write an elegiac poem about the suicide of this octopus or some other animal! Quatrains preferred but not required.
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