I am trying to write a happy poem.
Something Mary Oliverish with
love and epiphanies and flowers and
butterflies landing on my hand and—
all that shit.
My first attempt came out:
Happy Smiling People
Holding Guns.
That's not it.
You can't say you hate Mary Oliver.
That would be like saying you hate
the Easter Bunny.
She is certainly talented and
her poems are very extra special lovely.
I can't deny that.
But I'd really rather not.
Reading Mary Oliver today
is like making herbal tea
through a choking cloud
of wild fire smoke in
a flood rising hurricane
an end times earthquake
I've spent too much time
reading Ginsburg’s Howl with
Bob Kaufman’s eyes while
drinking like I'm sitting with
Bukowski. I am pushing through
all of Czeslaw Milosz after finishing
Andrea Gibson's The Madness Vase.
Best I can do:
I am learning the speech of birds—
rattle and croak and song by which
they reveal their true names
to those they allow to approach.
I watch them hunt and study
the blood red stems from which
half the elderberries are gone.
Happy Smiling People Writing Poems
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, Trampoline, Unlikely Stories, Peauxdunque Review, LMNL Anthology, 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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