An 'elephant in the room' is something important and obvious that people know well and ought to be discussed openly, but that is ignored nevertheless, because discussing or even considering it would cause too much embarrassment for themselves or discomfort for others. In this poem the 'elephant' is the unbridled growth of the number of human beings on Earth, which is the immediate and main cause of the wholesale destruction of nature and the much faster depletion of its, especially fossil, resources. (This inconvenient truth is also a theme in , a short story in the shape of a fictional legend at TRINPsite.)

Almost ceaselessly nowadays we hear environmentalists, politicians, journalists and others express their concern over the ongoing deterioration and disappearance of the natural environment, while at the same time talking light-heartedly or even admiringly about men and women who have four, five, six, seven or even more biological children. The ones talking in this way are not seldom those men or women themselves. However, people who really worry about the environment think of the world's actual or imminent human overpopulation and have a question for the person with three children: "Where is your with only one child?". They have a question for the person with four children: "Where is your one sib with no children, or where are your two sibs with only one child?". They have more serious questions for the persons with five or more children. This poem invites you to no longer deny the presence of the elephant in the room and to ask the environmentalists, the politicians, the journalists, the others and yourself.

Of course, a human being can live with nature without destroying it, but living with nature also means maintaining an equilibrium in which no species disturbs the balance of nature by growing too fast too big. This means, in turn, that human beings, too, should on average and until their death have no more than one child, or couples no more than two children, roughly speaking. This is the elephant proper, because discussing it could or would embarrass families with more than two biological children, and it could or would embarrass countries or communities that do little or nothing effective in the struggle against global human overpopulation, such as adequate family planning. Many would prefer to keep talking about cleaner cars, for instance, and about people taking the bus or train instead, without ever mentioning the incessantly growing number of human beings on this planet that will need or want some form of transportation in the near future, 'clean' or not.

Normally, a poem counting more than one stanza would have stanzas of equal length, that is, the same number of lines for each stanza. Or, if not the same number of lines, the lengths of the stanzas would vary in accordance with some finite scheme. The Elephant in the Room, however, is divided into six stanzas whose lengths are 1, 2, 4, 8, 16 and 32 lines (each line consisting of a minimum of seven and a maximum of ten syllables.) The length of the stanzas therefore increases exponentially, ad infinitum as it were. Unfortunately, the human world population seems to be increasing on the same kind of exponential curve. Hence, the perhaps unbalanced form of this poem is made to resemble the unbalanced growth of the number of human beings on this planet. Form clearly follows content here, ugly or not.

When reading this poem aloud to an audience the first stanza should be read very, very slowly, almost word by word. Each following stanza should be read faster than the previous one. In theory, the reading of the sixth and last stanza should not take much longer than the reading of the short stanzas at the beginning.