I.
There’s a chance everything has been assumed incorrectly.
There’s a chance I’ve gotten it all wrong.
Misplaced the dangling modifiers.
Left decimals out of column.
Commas forgotten, and misfired chromosomes
flipping an entire species on its genealogical frontal lobe.
Prophets tried to warn.
Seers and shaman returned
carrying markers of indemnity, lived experience
suffered and survived, until now
becomes instinct, systemic acceptance
defining the limits of beauty and love.
II.
Compressing time compares
particle versus wave, proxy tunnels
navigating both like wormholes
linking process and form.
Conceptual technology owes its existence
to the human body, the internalized
network of firewalls, end-stops, cul-de-sacs
of private intentions needing protection
from fear of the anonymous hack.
Conjunction subordinates proper speech.
By all indications, pop stars leave the myth-
making to poets and teachers.
Take a straw poll of life’s greatest fears.
See how many answers feature
bridges and tunnels connecting us,
and all things.
III.
I carry weight around unknown,
height a cradle-fantasy of remembered baptism.
I am never smart enough to think like a foreigner,
an outsider accustomed to facing nature
in its raw nakedness, beauty balanced and awe.
Some tastes require jugular sweetness,
warm country tabernacles surrounded by thick night.
Preachers wed desire with a mother’s faith,
common metaphor saving its best for last days
of character-selling, shelter-space limited
to flesh and imagination.
IV.
Sanctuary splits me confused, me not smart enough
to skate across thin layers of meaning.
Not understanding but knowing the difference
between here and not here
simultaneously. Nowhere to be found
depicted in watercolors is too diluted
for aristocrats and the general
practitioners of the Sacred Arts,
the Primal Magic of self-doubt,
paranoia, and its shady base
of operations in poetry.
Patrons pay my expenses, photograph my receipts.
Desire allocates, critiques my inner algebra,
formulas setting parameter for stammer
too elastic to eliminate its brittle shell.
After questioning, beauty accepts
quiet comfort, knowing fear remains
the only modern ignorance left to eradicate.
Marc Meierkort is a writer and educator who has taught high school English for 19 years. He is a graduate of Southern Illinois University at Carbondale (B.S.) and National-Louis University (M.A.T.), and he currently lives in Chicago’s suburbs. A Pushcart Prize nominee, he has recently had poems published by The Main Street Rag, Columbia College Literary Review, The Nassau Review, Inscape, and Spectrum.
