cryptical envelopment
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consider yourself a ghost
You got to be a spirit. Don’t be no ghost — Rastaman the Griot consider yourself a ghost alone in the woods without other people television phone internetwhile life of all kinds continuesaround you in green and brownblossom color and bird song assomething from a dream this dream see your self as spirit in a… Continue reading
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The Conquest of Grass
They roll out of a truck riding growling orange machines steered with two sticks like the reins of a team of horses, more horsepower and noise than the simpler mowers they replaced, once pushed by dads or hired kids. They come with screaming air cannons strapped to bodies armored against their own noise and choking… Continue reading
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Easter Hangover Monday
It’s Easter Hangover Monday, that peculiar New Orleans holiday when nothing is accomplished except perhaps some half-priced drug store chocolate consumed in the car. Bunny ears and flower crowns wilted on the television couch not watching the quiet green parade of a golftournament strictly for the green and trees and lagoon blue, that soft ambience… Continue reading
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I’m Being Haunted by a Moon Shadow
A poem from last fall I started to but never shared here Continue reading
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What Comes Next
I think the progression from Adonai deciding to break with the other Levantine gods in his tribe and end child sacrifice with Abraham, through the genocidal conversion of Northern Europe and much of the rest of the non-Asian world to Christianity, culminating in a genocidal slaughter of Islamic children by modern Likud Israel funded by… Continue reading
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Eating Cookies in America
Eating cookies while readingTrout Fishing in America They are molasses forwardwith a crisp ginger finish like driving from cane countryback home to New Orleans Continue reading
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Bob Kaufman
One exception to my suspicion of full on surrealism is Bob Kaufman. Postwar atomic automaton America could not be viewed straight on like the industrial films of 1960s early morning television. It required hallucinatory ViewMaster snapshots to portray its twisted Twilight Zone reality. Imagine this was the only possible approach. Unlike Ginsburg’s angelic screeds like… Continue reading
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I Sing The Body Plasmatic
I’m not struck by lightning when I write. Rather I am a neural magnetic container of a creative plasma which occasionally escapes into recombination, condensing into words. This is the creative disease which fluctuates between melancholic contemplation and maniacal creative discharge. Like an instrument it must be tuned to a certain contained waveform so that… Continue reading
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Marginalia to Andrei Codrescu’s “comrade past and mister present”
“Our job,“ said brother/Blaga, “is not to uncover it but to increase its mysteriousness.” I am not a surrealist and it’s probably too late to try at 68, unless I start taking LSD and shrooms again and write while tripping in the way the lines sometimes erupt when I’m drunk and land as obsidian, but… Continue reading
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Meditations in an Emergency Room
Alone at the end by a service door, relaxing on the gurney bed listening to the bustle elsewhere They’ve taken the loud, homophobic Christian zealot in handcuffs somewhere else. Two monitors beep just out of sync; waiting for them to meet again is not an ideal distraction. Just here for the stitches, thanks. Boredom. Shift… 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, 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 