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Cool Runnings
When the ladies at work* put up the question on the whiteboard, what movie makes you cry, I had to jump up and write my name and Cool Running, and explain:.at the last, after the crash, after the final “Sanka mon, you dead”, when what’s Derice says “we need to finish” and they carry the… Continue reading
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Why I did not grow more conservative with age
More on this after I finish organizing my thoughts. Writers are among the most sensitive, most intellectually anarchic, most representative, most probing of artists. The writer’s ability to imagine what is not the self, to familiarize the strange, & to mystify the familiar—all this is the test of her or his power. — Toni Morrison Continue reading
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Reading Lorca While Thinking Of Palestine
From the “Ballad of the Civil Guard, by Garcia-Lorca. The gypsies gatherat Bethlehem’s portal.Full of wounds, Saint Josephshrouds a young maiden.Sudden sharp riflesring through the night.The Virgin heals childrenwith spittle from stars.But the Civil Guard advances,sowing bonfires.where imagination burnsyoung and naked.Rosa of Camboriosmoans on her doorstep,with her two severed breastslying on a platter.And other girls… Continue reading
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The Whole World Is Watching
Once we were inured to horror by the smallness of our televisions, war a crackling black and white firefight a world away, until the cartoon television generation became their own Justice League and rose up singing, Love, children it’s just a kiss away it’s just a kiss away. They kept the cameras out next time,… Continue reading
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Old Black Joe
“I’m a comin’ I’m a comin ‘though my head is hanging low.” These lyrics were sung in some forgotten cartoon of my youth by a stereotypical bipedal hound dog. Only recently when they popped into my head a couple of times that I discover they were taken from the lyrics of “Old Black Joe” by… Continue reading
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The Fun House of Madness.
In a comment on a post of on Facebook I came up with the perfect description of my nightly dreamscape: A film by Federico Fellini, produced by Luis Briñel, from a script by David Lynch, Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett. Or as I like to to call it The Chase Light Colliope Fun House of… Continue reading
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Heathen
“A heathen, conceivably, but not I hope an unenlightened one.”— Lord Summerisle in The Wicker Man Continue reading
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NaPo WriMo Day 2; War Day 27
My Radio Is Bleeding My radio is bleeding heinousnews of war and ethnic cleansing.Once this nation and its allieswent to war to stop atrocity.Now it cowers in fear of lobbyistswho insist it endorse the horror,as the innocent inmates huddlein the concentration campawaiting death or ethnic cleansing. History did not start in October.A few of us… Continue reading
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Letter to myself
I wonder what sponsor counseled the guy whowrote me the apology letter for fucking my wife.It started I believe that night in the restaurant barwhen I couldn’t take her or another drink andleft them alone with a pitcher of margaritas. I’m sure she must have written but I don’t rememberreceiving or reading her letter. I… Continue reading
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Ghazal for the Lost
I first I called this a ghazal because of the form, but then I said, this is not an amatory poem for the absent beloved. Until I realized it was. What is this land for which my grandfather weeps into his tea?My plot is cinder block and corrugated tin. The door has no key. What… 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 