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I was cured, alright.
Last Friday night I drank one cocktail (a bit strong) and one dropper of my THC tincture. When I went to bed I was looking for something to read and opened John Berryman’s The Dream Songs, and it clicked for the first time in years. I wrote a half dozen lines, finished them the next Continue reading
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Do Not Go Gently Into That Future
“Because we have not made our lives to fit our places, the forests are ruined, fields eroded, streams polluted & mountains overturned. Continue reading
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And now, for something completely different.
I just wrote what I think is a thoughtful, coherent political think piece of 691 words. It is the longest thing I have written in the last several years. And I have a lot more to say. The secret to returning to a life of writing is to start writing. So I am going to Continue reading
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Ten Years After
It has been four months since I stopped Risperidone, the drug which lobotomized the creative part of my brain which danced hand in hand with Bipolar Disorder. And I have not kept this blog up, which is not a good sign. And I still struggle to read serious poetry, which was at the center of Continue reading
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Risperi…done
I finally had my long appointment with my practitioner. She listened as I described my experiences of the last several years, and my concerns. I had been inclined to go off of the Prozac feeling I perhaps never really needed it, as I never approached all of the criteria for depression. She instead suggested, based Continue reading
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Rispire…done
I finally had my long meeting with my practitioner about my medication experience. I covered my last five years of symptoms that are either in regression or at least euthymic. I had been inclined to first stop the Prozac, as that seemed the medication I was least in need of. My down cycles were never Continue reading
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Becoming and Unbecoming
Life is a process of becoming, a combination of states we have to go through. Where people fail is that they wish to elect a state and remain in it. This is a kind of death. Anais Nin Every year in June for decades I would read Ulysses in June, in celebration of the day Continue reading
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An Unquiet Mind
I went directly from Touched With Fire to Dr. Lay Redfield Jamison’s An Unquiet Mind: A Memoir of Moods and Madness, her chronicle of her own battle with manic-depressive disorder and how it informed her career in mental health. Her candor about the extremities of her illness, and the criticality of maintaining medication upon diagnosis Continue reading
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Well Bottom Blues
—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, Dream Song No. 25 In August 2005, not only the levees of New 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 