Answer:
"Elliptical" is a prose poem.
Rewritten with line breaks:
They just can’t seem to…
They should try harder to…
They ought to be more…
We all wish they weren’t so…
They never…
They always…
Sometimes they…
Once in a while they…
However it is obvious that they…
Their overall tendency has been…
The consequences of which have been…
They don’t appear to understand that…
If only they would make an effort to…
But we know how difficult it is for them to…
Many of them remain unaware of…
Some who should know better simply refuse to…
Of course, their perspective has been limited by…
On the other hand, they obviously feel entitled to…
Certainly we can’t forget that they…
Nor can it be denied that they…
We know that this has had an enormous impact on their…
Nevertheless their behavior strikes us as…
Our interactions unfortunately have been…
Compare and contrast:
The poet's choice of form has pros and cons. On the one hand, because none of the sentences in the poem are completed, the paragraph-like structure of the poem could make it easy for the reader to get lost or bored. However, this may still have been a valid artistic choice. After all, the poem is about the "elliptical" of excuses for racism, so maybe it makes sense to have the reader get tired, and associate that weariness with those excuses. In contrast, making the poem have lines and stanzas, rather than a paragraph structure, makes the reader more likely to try to interpret the individual significance of each line, rather than look at what the lines all mean together.
