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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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Beach Proem After Olson
Black welk fragments and tiny shiny bits just where the surf defines the tideline, I choose a spit of sand where the beach turns and set out. There are no sea birds here among the beach people but past the tented encampments terns glide and stride on the wet sand as I do. One walks Continue reading
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Calf foot blues
Stock bones boiling in this pot black, hissing gas ring hot night, a slow reduction to the elemental in the fan-stirred simmerof this gelatin evening. 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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Just another manic Monday
Sunday Neurosis: Victor Frankl is thought to have coined the term Sunday Neurosis referring to a form of depression resulting from an awareness in some people of the emptiness of their lives once the working week is over. Psychology Wiki. Saturday’s are my least favorite day of the week. Allowed to just sit and drink Continue reading
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The Old New Orleans
I was locked out of Lakeview NextDoor for three days after I called out a woman who said the poor services at the West End Walgreens was likely due to “corporate DEI” goals or quotas, I forget which and can’t see her post again for three days. My first comment was, “wow, did you really Continue reading
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Re-reading Hopscotch in the 21st Century
In Defense of the Kindle When I first read Hopscotch in mass-market paperback edition late in high school in the 1970s, I was taken by the combined celebration and critique of mid-20th century bohemia. I was drawn to it perhaps because I was also reading the Beats, and learning of the early folk scene in Continue reading
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He Might Be The Prince of Peace Returning
https://youtu.be/2DYzLna5UzA I am not a Xian but rather an enemy of the fascist turn of the American and Catholic Xian churches. But I pray for you this day–Passover Easter or Ramadan– a day of Peace. A truce if you will. Your Jesus is not dead. He is having a smoke in an Amsterdam Cafe with Continue reading
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Age 13.
Headphones. Sticky Fingers. Dreaming not of Farrah Fawcett but of Nico and Marianne Faithful.“It’s just that evil life has got you in it’s sway.” This explains so much of the last 50 years. “Wild Horses… 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 