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Siriusly
Venus is sinking. The moon is fleeing. The air is a breathless bath-water smothering. The rain is elsewhere. The clouds have flown. The dogs are all weary. The crickets are silent. The sun is waiting, just over the horizon, ready for another chorus of those Summertime Blues. Continue reading
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Churn and Taxis
The back of a Toyota Uber pales against the Rocket V-8 Cab Rasta madman who took our drunken asses back to Carrollton when the green streetcar failed to appear on Canal. His rattletrap blue GM something rang like a Jamaican sleigh over the potholes, & when his glove box popped open, spilling fat spliffs into… Continue reading
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Found Poem
Another drop of poison and I’ll dream of foreign lands …where … here and there, an old sailor, Drunk and asleep in his boots, Catches tigers In red weather. Continue reading
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The Slow Noon Burn of June 16
Originally posted on June 20, 2009 on my Toulouse Street–Odd Bits of Life in New Orleans blog Canal Street in the slow noon burn of June. Thin dribbles of tourists pass up and down, hug the narrow ledge of shade along the buildings as if some abyss yawned at the curb. A handful of hotel… Continue reading
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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
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 