This poem is sort of a koan. It makes convoluted sense, but the point is to get us to go into a maze of imagining, to get lost and find our way through by trusting that the world the poet is asking us to imagine is simply a world of people that can imagine a world with elephants.

::::::::

Can you imagine a world without elephants?
Imagine a world without people-
who-can't-live-in-a-world-without-elephants.
Now imagine a world without people-who-can't-
imagine-a-world-without-people-who-
can't-imagine-a-world-
without-elephants.
Imagine a world of elephants without people-
who-can-live-in-a-world-without-elephants.
Imagine a world of people-
who-can't-imagine-a-world-of-people-who-can't-imagine-
elephants-without-a world.
Now imagine a world
without elephants-without-a-world.
Now imagine that world-without-elephants-without-a-world
within a world with people-who-
can-imagine-a-world-with-elephants-
without-people-who-can't-imagine-a-world-without-elephants.
Now imagine that that world-without-elephants-without-a-world
is within a world of people-who-not-only-can-
imagine-a-world-with-elephants,
but can't-imagine-a-world-of-people-who-can't-imagine
elephants-without-a-world-
of-people-who-can't-imagine-a-world-without-elephants
is this world.
Imagine this world.

Authors Website: https://garylindorff.wordpress.com

Authors Bio:

Gary Lindorff is a poet, writer, blogger and author of five nonfiction books, three collections of poetry, "Children to the Mountain", "The Last recurrent Dream" (Two Plum Press), "Conversations with Poetry (coauthored with Tom Cowan), and a memoir, "Finding Myself in Time: Facing the Music". Lindorff calls himself an activist poet, channeling his activism through poetic voice. He also writes with other voices in other poetic styles: ecstatic, experimental and performance and a new genre, sand-blasted poems where he randomly picks sentence fragments from books drawn from his library, lists them, divides them into stanzas and looks for patterns. Sand-blasted poems are meant to be performed aloud with musical accompaniment.


He is a practicing dream worker(with a strong, Jungian background) and a shamanic practitioner. His shamanic work is continually deepening his partnership with the land. This work can assume many forms, solo and communal, among them: prayer, vision questing, ritual sweating, and sharing stories by the fire. He is a born-pacifist and attempts to walk the path of non-violence believing that no war is necessary or inevitable.