False Narratives and other poems by Lauren Suchenski

False narratives
this one was the one I concocted – news (though it was fake,
it was new)
or olds
or things sold, re-sold, re-hashed, hashed-brown, mashed down,
spoken up, thrown up (hands or hopes)(hungers or hollows)

Implicate it –
the degradation of delusion
Implicate me too – my treason, or what’s the reason
for resisting anything
What’s the reason I reason out anything at all
if it’s all already cut up for me
into bite-sized pieces
bite-sized soundbite chicken fingers playing chicken
with a finger up to the field of reason
we once held high

What large lies you have –
all the better to see you with, my dear

---

Recipe for Success 3.0

Five cauldrons of what is called called-in, phoned-in, phony slabs of sincerity
19 bottles of bones and beaks and broken hearts
Fourteen karat gold and a heart of silverstone
Twelve days of Christmas and all the days inbetween
11 sounds of certainty and a ringing in your chest which can’t be dulled
9 grams of sugar
24 packs of 24 packs
6 packs of 6 packs
8 Lords of sleeping
And all the weary words you’ll always forget to say

Stir, pot, sift, shift, wander, wallow, willow, wish, purse your lips, parse your words, dice your words, mince your words, mind your manners, mind your tongue, mind the gap, fill in the gaps, gape your heart wide open and give it away.

---

Hive mind live

Hive mind live
Or live mind online
Or rapture mind on the precipice
Of presciently pressing on the precipitation
Of presently unfolding presence
– What I’m talking about is evolution, isn’t that right?
Isn’t that what’s left when the left lifts up the lungs of the earth
And breaths sideways into the tidal pools
Into the tectonic shifts in technology
Into the turpentine tools of time

Aren’t there plates, and aren’t they moving? That’s the real question, isn’t that right?

Live mind living
Or lucid love walking – isn’t that the spinning
Of new stories into old hearts?
No, I mean old myths into new nations
No, I mean old curtsies to new constructs –
All construction caving in like the curtain curling back
Like the call calling back
Like the call curving outwards – the telephone, the voice, the answer –
All networked in a circle (a prism?) or a sphere (a globe)
Or a globular conglomerate glomming on to the
Golden template of something still gleaming –
That glint of grace still growing
In the ground

---

Oh come let us adore him

oh come let us adore him
this wandering hole called wit
seed, a plant, a seed I planted
named zeus, I watered him well
I wandered him through the other side of hell
he towered – strongman that he is
and I kissed his cheek
I pressed my clavicle to his bone (he ate his own children, I heard)
he had lighting, but moreso,
he had a mountain – an Olympic tenor to his voice
he held the patriarchy in his tiny hands
he – with tiny hands
myself – with tiny eyes
seeing – all but
nothing there

---

Hi TV.

Hi TV.
It’s just you and me
(well, you and me
and nine thousand executives under the sea
telling me what to see)

Hi TV
I love you too. The hungry ads, the warbling
pundits, the wallowing eyes /
Wolf Blitzer staring back at me (his name
a poem in itself)
like maybe I know the answer instead

Maybe I know the answer instead.

---

Time moves slow,

times moves slow,
gathers up the edges of June and splatters them towards the rainy afterbubble-gurgle of midnightnoon.
I sit. perched and gulping down huge chunks of fresh night air
watching the dust gather in this recycled room of old hunks of memoryflesh.
this is the place. this is the gathering space for all my holy artifacts of the artifice of life.
this is the cocoon for cornered, corrugated connections between me and my memories.
these four walls have safety knitted into their knobbled knees. this gravity collector keeps
my mass of matter momentarily manifested.
this bundle of burdenless housebones have aching joints and jolted points.
this room meets me in the middle and never stops heaving my secrets out the solid square windows.
shh shh- silence the big bells of broken open meaningcatchers
let me listen to the sound of dust mites collecting what I have already given away.
no one is here except absolutely everything I am not.
at last, at last the words fit back into place
like placements of irreplaceable spaces.

About the author:

Lauren Suchenski is a fragment sentence-dependent, ellipsis-loving writer and lives somewhere where the trees change color. Her poetry has been published in over 40 magazines and her first chapbook “Full of Ears and Eyes Am I” is due out this June from Finishing Line Press. She is a Pushcart Prize nominee and she loves to swim inside syllables. You can find more of her writing on Instagram: @lauren_suchenski and on Twitter: @laurensuchenski.