Look at all the sleeping elephants in this room!

Everyone knows they are there.
You can’t miss them,
can’t move around and find a comfortable place
to sit.

They stink, they snore,
and those infernal trunks
keep dream-slipping
into our pockets and pants.

The problem, of course,
is that everyone here is practicing
their lead guitar skills.  Everyone
wants to be Hendrix, rip and tear
the sky, fly recklessly up and down
their necks with the amps turned
all the way up.  You don’t have to listen
to anyone, not even the elephants,
if you play lead guitar.

We line the limited wall space with our eyes closed
and tolerate the elephants’ intrusion
while we shred and never hear a thing.
Superstars, all of us.  And when the beasts
rise, start to rocking our tunes, tear shit up,

we’ll blame the bass players,
the drummers, the rhythm sections,
the vocalists who got on the nerves
of the sleeping giants and made them angry;
not us and our Godlike soloing and screaming,
ego stroke pick rakes, hammer ons, pull offs,
dive bombs, distortion,

our eyes closed, our noses in the air,
our backs against the smashed walls.

Rich misunderstandings
full of bile and consequence —

frosting
on a rotten cake.  People

stare across barbed cable
at each other, standing on soapboxes

built on fear, on arrogance,
on ignorance and outsized grievance —

wailing
you don’t know me, how dare you,

you’re not my kind —
who are among your kind?

Look like,
think like, bleed like,

weep like, feel like.
Like’s got everything to do with it,

and like is so brittle now
it breaks easily on a letter of law

or practice.  In the sulfur cloud
that dusts up after the word snaps

we lose each other.  We can’t see
how like we are.  We can’t sense

each other in the poison twilight,
and everyone’s got a knife.

The money’s got legs!
It’s heading for the door.
Stop it!  Tackle it and wrestle it
and make it submit

or seduce it. Lick its ears
and if you’re inclined that way,
its chest and groin. 
Make yourself believe
it’s love. 

One way or the other
you’ve got to arrest the money’s
escape.  Detain the money
and lock it in a secret prison.
Torture it if you’ve got the stones.
Make it give up secrets you can’t trust,
pursue unproductive lines of inquiry,
then come back and slap the money around.

The money speaks a foreign language.
You’ll need a translator, one you can put
utter faith in.  Listen to what it tells you!
It’s terrible how much the money knows.
It’s not possible that all your secrets
are in the money’s possession. 

All this would never have been necessary
if you had just cut the money’s legs off
when it was young. 
It would have just laid there.
It wouldn’t have caused you any trouble at all.
You could have outrun it
any time you wanted to.

“The most immediate hurdle:
getting the two sides into the same room.”

That seems so obvious: I can’t even keep track
of which one feels more aggrieved

or which has more right to their pain,
as if pain was a fundamental right.

Then again,
that’s the fundamental problem:  that each side

feels its right to the title of victim
has been more compromised.  If God or anyone

knows how to tally that, he or she
ought to weigh in with something

everyone can agree on, a bar graph
explaining how much blood has been spilled

across the ages by the gallon, and have them
initial it, the way the doctors gather

and initial a body before they begin to cut,
claiming their territory, making sure they’ve got it right

and that nothing unnecessary happens. 
But that’s at the very least unlikely.  Instead the two sides,

drunk on anger and history, mistaking skin
for parchment and bone for flagpoles,

will likely slash with sharp pens at imagined borders,
then stand up thumping their chests

from the butcher block
to huff away into their bunkers and push pins into maps,

maps that will bleed again soon enough and spoil the carpets
in a safe room where everyone once gathered

ostensibly to heal faraway patients who, as always, will wonder
when they’ll ever be asked into the meeting room to speak

of a third side, the one made up of bodies
covered with mazes of bold initials and jagged scars.

That lump you can see from here?
That is a nation on its belly.

It may be motionless.
If it is moving, it is crawling;

if it is crawling,
it is crawling toward where it believes

it should be: high on a mountain.
Some in the nation believe

they are standing tall, others
that they are crushed flat

because those who believe they’re standing tall
are standing upon them.

Maybe, though, no one is crawling at all,
and no one is completely still;

maybe what we see is the ground
sliding away from beneath them.

How is it that we have come to be here
watching this?  What place is this

where we can watch such a thing?
They seemed so far away,

once upon a time.  We’d thought
we’d found the perfect spot to watch this happen;

now it seems that we’re approaching
the place they’re approaching,

and it seems as well that the footing where we’re standing
is beginning to writhe.

In the corner of the weedy lot,
one brick and a restless crowd.
Something needs to happen.
A wall needs to be built
for a new house or a fortress.
If this brick were a harmonica
perhaps a song could be written.
But it has no holes or reeds.
No music in this brick
without a hollow log to bang it on.
No mortar or even mud here
to bind it to another brick
which is also not present.

A few members of the crowd note
that one could sit for hours making lists
of things needed for something to happen
if one only had pencil and paper
to record them on. 

While this is happening,
windows in towers on all sides of the lot
fill with onlookers wondering
when someone in the crowd
will realize the brick
can be used a missile.

Should we do something,
they murmur among themselves? 

We should.  We should hide
the sand and mortar and the wood
one could use for making doors
or battering rams for knocking down
existing doors.   Someone down there
is going to figure it out soon enough
if we don’t take action. 

Let us do that, then.
We can talk about how to hide it all
before we begin.  There are differences of opinion
but we all know what must be done,
so let’s agree on this:
that no matter how we disagree,
we can’t let anyone
in the mob outside hear.