Nobody sensible asks for white walls and sedatives, and that is exactly the trick of Oliver Delgaram-Nejad's "Nursing Home". Its speaker places an order, almost politely, like a guest at a hotel desk, yet everything on the list is something they dread. Beneath the mock-request lies a blunt accusation: that old age, in the place the title names, means being tidied, calmed and quietly erased.
The poem is only six lines long, split into two three-line stanzas, and the setting never appears in the text itself, only in the title. Inside there are no beds, corridors or nurses, just a handful of chosen details, so the reader has to build the rest of the building. The first detail is also the barest: "white walls". White is the absence of colour, a blank with nothing in it to rest the eye on. The two stressed words sit side by side, so the phrase lands with a thud, like a door being shut.
Then comes "false family, dressed in green", where the language turns sharper. "False" sits right beside "family", the warmest word in the poem, and the two cancel each other out. "Dressed" suggests costume, a role performed rather than a bond lived, and green, judging by the setting, probably points to uniforms or scrubs. But green is also the colour of spring and new leaves, so there is a grim irony in life's colour being worn by those who preside over its ending. Notice, too, that the poem never calls the carers cruel. "False" may be aimed at the arrangement, paid closeness standing in for real relatives, rather than at the people in green.
The second stanza moves from the room to the person inside it. "Bring me pills / To slow my growth" is odd on purpose, because we rarely say that old people grow. By choosing that word, the speaker insists that a human being is still developing at eighty, still becoming someone, and that medication which slows them is stopping something alive. Then the verb escalates from "slow" to "suffocate". A service that sounds clinical and gentle ends in a word that belongs to violence, not medicine. "Dreams" is double as well, meaning ambitions or the dreams of sleep, and either way the speaker imagines them being smothered rather than simply fading.
There is no rhyme and no steady metre, but the poem is far from loose. Each stanza has the same shape: two short lines followed by a longer one, roughly four, four and eight syllables, then three, four and six. The stanza gathers length and delivers its sting at the end. Both stanzas open with an imperative, "Give me" and "Bring me", and the repeated "me" and "my" keep one lone person at the centre while everything else is done to them. The only echo at the line-ends is a faint one between "green" and "dreams", which share a long e sound, and "dressed" and "dreams" both begin with "dr". These small links quietly connect the costumed carers to the smothered dreams, as though one led to the other.
Look, too, at what the speaker asks for: white, false, slow, suffocate. Every request is a subtraction. The speaker orders colour, truth, speed and breath to be taken away, which says what they fear without ever saying "I am afraid." The opening "When I am old" says "when", not "if", so the poem reads as a prediction as much as a complaint, and the sarcasm keeps it from sliding into self-pity.
That compression is what makes the poem worth reading. A subject usually handled with sympathy or statistics gets a dry, bitter voice instead, and in six lines the poem leaves an uncomfortable question behind: if you were writing your own order for old age, what would you ask for instead?