The Typist
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The Spirit of the Mask
Something I wrote 17 years ago for sadly departed friend Victoria Slind-Flor, formerly of New Orleans, for the guests of a Carnival Ball in miniature she was hosting in Oakland, CA, To the Honored Members and Guests of the Krewe of Baubo and Ame no Uzume: When one is called to Carnival, the first question Continue reading
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This is me, is us
The Challenger shuttle, the first Gulf War, 9/11, the second Gulf War, COVID, Trump. These were universal or near universal cataclysms that shaped generations. This quote is me, is us, in the middle 1960s, facing the lurking horrors we were schooled to, watching fire fights on the news in black and white while somewhere in Continue reading
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The Coming Troubles
Kristi Noem appearing behind a podium sign “One of ours All of yours” is an open threat to kill protestors. That statement is associated with the Nazi policy of murdering an entire village if one person committed an act of violent, active resistance. If an ICE agent is injured or killed I don’t expect the 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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It’s time to take Anxiety for a walk
It’s time to take Anxiety for a walk. He won’t take a leash; she only comes when I don’t call; to calm us both we need to retreat to the trees. This is my hof, my temple, my cathedral.Not gods exactly but simultaneously chthonic and a partof the heavens. Tree of Life Genesis and RevelationsKalpavriksha Continue reading
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Not Hurricane Katrina; The Federal Flood
I don’t think I going to watch the documentary on Hulu. I don’t need a documentary to tell me what happened, or how it happened. I watched closely from a distance until I returned home Memorial Day 2006 reoorting and editorialising the tens of thousands of words on my blogs for the next several years. Continue reading
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The Price of Humanity
I am increasingly comfortable with the karmic cost of my unbridled hate for MAGA. My father was not a bad man; certainly not an evil man. I wish for everyone MAGA from Trump on down, all of them, what my father wished for the Nazis in Belgium in 1944: in service to the ideals of Continue reading
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Next Weekend at Marienbad
Let’s go! Outof here intoa b&winnocencea distantpalatial set piecethe classyevening clothesthe driftof mysterydropping our ragsworried into holes and be strangersmeant for each otheragain. Continue reading
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Drunk Bigots Blowing Shit Up
My German and French Acadian people, who arrived 50 years before the “American” revolution, were sold to “America” a century after they arrived here, unconsulted, along with the slaves in the fields and the “merciless Indian Savages” who showed the founders true democracy and were crushed for it. All just another colonial commodity to the Continue reading
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I Refuse
“To your mad world, one answer: I refuse.” — Marina Tsvetaeva 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 