Elephants - Raymond Hoffman

All are elephants

Tethered to crowds

Told to get lost

Gargantuan are appetites

But never a plate offered

Keeping face a tiring extreme

Relaxed when disciplined gaits flee

Anchored frigates at table

The underappreciated with outcast

Distinct are the cultures and class

The repudiated an exclave

A transplant of footing

Frigid to those alike

Not so discrete to the invisible ones

Amongst the murk nobody knows where to confide

Trumpeting like elephants tormented

Not so together?

Life feel obscene?

Don’t wail in the open

Most hazardous are the critics

The commotion of a frantic:

Is a life off tilt.

---

Raymond Hoffman has a background in political science and Southeast Asian Studies. He has taught in China for many years and currently is a fifth grade teacher in the Midwest. Poetry writing has been used by him as a coping mechanism for bipolar disorder for over a decade now. Sylvia Plath has always been a great source of inspiration, as has been Albert Camus.