The Typist
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The Last Days of May
I was born in 1957 and so I am reckoned by some one of the last of the baby boomers, that generation borne by the parents who went through World War II. I grew up in a neighborhood full of fathers who had served in World War II, some later in Korea, and frankly I… Continue reading
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Reading Pablo Neruda
and all the other reprobates, I think: broken people make art—and do other reprehensible, sometimes horrific malfunctional things. Artists step outside the bounds of propriety to describe it. Some are cast out because of social deformity. They are inherently transgressive. They sit away from the communal fire. They wander long in the woods. Some transgress into the… Continue reading
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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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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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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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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
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 