poetry
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Poète Maudit Part Deux
Being a conduit for lightning is difficult for those around me when it spills over into incesssnt chatter or abrupt irritability so I try to keep it locked in this office like Frankenstein’s monster, venting mostly on the page. Continue reading
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Dead Zone
My butterfly plants draw only waspsThe mosquito truck passes (again)incidentally erasing the dragonfliesLawns around are perfectharlequin green rectanglesChildren search in vain for a dandelion to make a wishfor butterflies & dragonflies Continue reading
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Poète Maudit
I wish to claim the designation poète maudit not as Verlaine first meant, the edgy Madness of Baudelaire and Rimbaud. I know what poète maudit looks like. Thaddeus Comti was my friend. I claim it as one possessed by poetry, mounted as by a loa. Is this symptomatic or bipolar disorder as some believe, or… Continue reading
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The Green Fellow
Walking is meditation if it enters into sudden birdsong and kaleidoscopic green. Not stillness. Not transcendence. I don’t want to escape this world. I don’t want the lotus unless I can wade in to admire it. I want to enter into this world as a duck enters water, as a towering tree enters the earth,… Continue reading
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Remember Me
I want to make a good impressionon the earth this forest to remember me like birdsong in the rain when all the rest of me is burnt bonemy life laid out at last (no cut flowersplease) at the Goodwill Store. Continue reading
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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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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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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
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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