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Bike
I’ve got a bike, you can ride it if you likeIt’s got a basket, a bell that ringsAnd things to make it look goodI’d give it to you if I could, but I borrowed it. “Bike” Pink Floyd I think I was cycling the other day. No, not around the park. Instead I started reading… Continue reading
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Well Bottom Blues
Not my current state of mind but a part of the blog title’s genesis. The well bottom is like the bottom of the sea. Things down here stay very still, keeping their original forms, as if under tremendous pressure, unchanged from day to day. A round slice of light floats high above me: the evening… Continue reading
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Dream Song No. 25
—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 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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Midwest Memories
A small town in Northwest Minnesota. A grandparent in the graveyard the price of full admission. My friend who lived there 20 years reading at Mass while I stood in the back with my restless child and a woman asked who he was and the other answered, oh that’s Ted F. He’s new in town.… Continue reading
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The Fall of the Towers
YOU ARE TRAPPED IN THAT BRIGHT MOMENTWHERE YOU LEARNED YOUR DOOM— Samuel R. Delaney in City of a Thousand Suns Fifteen years ago I found something of promise in that quote from Delaney’s novel about a society shattered by the discovery that all of their foundational truths were lies, in the promise of the rebuilding in… Continue reading
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The Kids Are Alright
Last night at the Saenger Theatre in New Orleans for Billy and the Kids, with Molly Tuttle outsigning Donna Godchaux and a fine piano player and Billy Strings in his best late 70s-80s mature Garcia voice, I could close my eyes for a minute and imagine myself at the Fox Theatre in Atlanta, GA in… 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 