poetry
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Bike
I’ve got a bike, you can ride it if you likeIt’s got a basket, a bell that ringsAnd things to make it look goodI’d give it to you if I could, but I borrowed it. “Bike” Pink Floyd I think I was cycling the other day. No, not around the park. Instead I started reading… Continue reading
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Dream Song No. 25
—Hand me back my crawl, condign Heaven. Tighten into a ball elongate & valved Henry. Tuck him peace. Render him sightless, or ruin at high rate his crampon focus, wipe out his need. Reduce him to the rest of us. — John Berryman Continue reading
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Dymphna, Patron of the Mad
I am reading On A Wednesday Night poems from the creative writing workshop at the University of New Orleans, and discovered a saint story I don’t recall from my confirmation Book of Saints. That is likely because I had the boy’s edition, from which we were to select our confirmation name. I chose Thomas after… Continue reading
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Touched with fire
“Sufficient anxiety is its own / persistent meditative state.”. – K.S. Reading an MFA anthology of a program I’m interested in and halfway through I come across a poem that makes me think: bipolar disorder. Most students have two or three poems and she has only one. I hope she made it. I recently met… Continue reading
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Weird Scenes Inside The Goldmine
No serious hope of ever publishing this so sharing here for those who remember The Goldmine is an old biker bar,where Galloping Gooses once drainedOdyssean pitchers of the Champagneof Bottled Beer in the dark of afternoon. Now college girls & their boys &the old men who want to fuck thecollege girls dance in the wee… Continue reading
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Back in the Saddle Again
So this blog didn’t work out as I planned it just over a year ago. I captured some of my thoughts as I titrated off the anti-psychotic risperidone in hopes of overcoming the writing block that descended on me seven years ago. Like most anti-psychotics it was designed to make crazy people calm the fuck… Continue reading
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There is a bitter root
Somewhere in this house is (should be) a hardback first edition (foxed) City Lights pocketbook of the selected poems of Federico Garcia Lorca. I carried it to Spain and laid it on his desk in his home in town. My tour had to wait for the private visit of a famous bullfighter. And I had… Continue reading
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The Consumation of Grief
I even hear the mountainsthe way they laughup and down their blue sidesand down in the waterthe fish cryand the wateris their tears.I listen to the wateron nights I drink awayand the sadness becomes so greatI hear it in my clockit becomes knobs upon my dresserit becomes paper on the floorit becomes a shoehorna laundry… 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 