Compose your life like a prose poem suddenly interrupted by hummingbirds mistaking a woman’s perfume for wildflowers in Arles. A fast and bulbous moon the only excuse necessary for hallucinatory episodes at the Starbucks counter, visualizing Cthulhu in the foam and blocking the concoction of monstrous coffee drinks. When confronted with a Don’t Walk sign, improvise. Sing. Tear up the book in your pocket and stuff a poem into each mail mailbox you pass. This is not chaos. This is the Coriolis force reordering helpless pedestrians into strophes, storefronts into episodes, sparrows into characters. Don’t be pigeonholed into a notebook occupying a park bench. Don’t let your day be the litter of butts around an outside table. Don’t spend your nights lonely and mooning over your poetry. This is not how sonnets work. Follow a dark woman with a fistful of violets in your hand. When she confronts you, hand her the flowers. Tell her she has mistaken you for a villanelle. Smile. Anything could happen, the moment you have been fomenting all day.
Interrupted by Hummingbirds
About Me
Mark Folse is a provincial diarist and aspiring minor poet from New Orleans. His past blogging adventures included the Katina/Federal Flood blog wetbankguide on blogspot.com which David Simon told NY Magazine was one of three blogs that helped inform Treme, and Toulouse Street–Odd Bits of Life in New Orleans, which once outranked the Doobie Brothers on Google Search. His work has appeared in The Dead Mule School of Southern Literature, The New Delta Review, Metazen, New Laurel Review, Ellipsis, What We Know: New Orleans as Home, Please Forward, The Maple Leaf Rag IV, and A Howling in the Wires (which he co-edited).
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Well Bottom Blues 
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