cryptical envelopment
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Stop Reading Berryman’s Sonnets, Dammit
(23) If you don’t have laugh lines and crows feetthe forehead crinkles of surprise and delighthave you even lived enough? A roundsoft tummy to lay my head in bed?Hell yes. What would we even talkabout otherwise? You’re onlyas old as I feel you are. If that’smale gazy you have my entire attention. I’m balding gray, Continue reading
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Out of a Canon
without a net… This was originally written in verse as an appendix to a resignation letter to the MFA program I’ve dropped out of mostly because I can’t afford it but also because of subtle but pervasive age incrimination An ancient whale washed up on Lakeshore Drive with barnacles as old as the the University’s Continue reading
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His Raptures
so many,I had not thought death had undone so many. — T.S. Eliot, “The Wasteland” Not death but that fine madness, though so many ended their own lives: John Berryman, Anne Sexton, Delmore Schwartz. I have lied about suicidal ideation to psych although that has mostly been a creative excersise. Have you ever thought: stop Continue reading
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Clown Face
Brain maniacally pedaling the veledromeof cyclothymia and I can’t stop writingabout the women keeping me up at nightbut only in my dreams and calculationsof the tells I think I see across the tableas my second adolescence wobblesonto the track obsessed with his Big Wheelroaring to run away with the circus with-out ending up in Blue Continue reading
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It’s not the coffee
I am Captain Cortisol, The Amazingly Electric Man I start my day with the Heebie Jeebees and coffee. Imagine the visible veins in your skin as wiring now run an unpleasant current through yourselfas if your whole body was an extension of your tongue and you’ve just put that nine volt battery on. It’s that Continue reading
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There’s more, Leonard
“Poetry is just the evidence of life.If your life is burning well, poetry is just the ash.”– Leonard Cohen I saw this Instagram post quote and thought: ash like the black strain on paper. but also the warmth of shared connection, the flicker of imagination’s possibilities, and the smoke rising up to the heavens. Continue reading
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Galactic Vocabulary
Reading Author Sae’ collection The Glass Constellation and I’m grateful it’s on Kindle because of the ease of looking up his galacticly vast vocabulary. If, sitting assembled in that university workshop, you find my formal-leaning lines of poetry simplistic: it’s OK. I wasn’t writing for you. Continue reading
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 