bipolar disorder
-
That Roaring Between The Ears
When my decades in remission bipolar came roaring to the fore after Hurricane Katrina / The Federal Flood and my ugly divorce it was easiest just to let the demon take possessions and run the streets with Mr Hyde. He was a fun guy to be around except for the roaring hangovers on far too… Continue reading
-
Poète Maudit Part Deux
Being a conduit for lightning is difficult for those around me when it spills over into incesssnt chatter or abrupt irritability so I try to keep it locked in this office like Frankenstein’s monster, venting mostly on the page. Continue reading
-
Poète Maudit
I wish to claim the designation poète maudit not as Verlaine first meant, the edgy Madness of Baudelaire and Rimbaud. I know what poète maudit looks like. Thaddeus Comti was my friend. I claim it as one possessed by poetry, mounted as by a loa. Is this symptomatic or bipolar disorder as some believe, or… Continue reading
-
Prozac-Tinted Glasses
Yes I feel unwell withoutmy Prozac-tinted glasseseverything is sharperthe news more abhorrent the horrors closerthe usual annoyanceslike wire-traps snapI take the persistentmockingbird personallyeverything is altered The trees in my daily forest escape differentiatethe greens unfold in a Pantone kaleidoscope birdsong susurrationripples in sunlighteverything everythingimmersionnot aversionlearning to manage the amplificationunbound my eyes exploreall the cinematic angleseverything… Continue reading
-
Out Is Through
Day 17 since I completed my titration off of Prozac. I was taking it for symptomatic or co-mobid anxiety while in remission from bi-polar disorder. I’m generally doing pretty well although I’m irritable and suffer from what the literature calls flu-like symptoms but I call allergy/hangover-like symptoms, a non-specific. miasma of the body, as if… Continue reading
-
I Sing The Body Plasmatic
I’m not struck by lightning when I write. Rather I am a neural magnetic container of a creative plasma which occasionally escapes into recombination, condensing into words. This is the creative disease which fluctuates between melancholic contemplation and maniacal creative discharge. Like an instrument it must be tuned to a certain contained waveform so that… Continue reading
-
A Factory of Reinvention
The first time Sam (her chosen name)went down to the riverI stayed on the stepstipped a musicianfor St. James Infirmarywhile her husband Davescattered Rebecca(her given name)into the Mississippi. New Orleansis a factoryof reinvention.Come as you are.Be who you wish.Leave by the river. I only called herby her pen name–rather her personna–in the boisterous bohemia of… Continue reading
-
Motor Head
As a second Guinness spreads its dark blanketover a rough idling motor mind sucking fumesyou begin to understand heroin’s attractionfor artists with a similar redline turbine mindwhen Maxwell’s demon stokes the furnace boxto a dangerous boiling, release valve screaming. Continue reading
-
Holiday in Cyclothemia
Informally known as “BiPolar III” it is that disorder’s slightly less demented cousin and counts as “in remission.” April 31is International Surrealist Poetry Day!Celebrate with your favorite elephantsycophant. Read them a bowl a alphabet soup omitting the vowels. Watch them writhe with excitement in South Pacific musicalmescaline color! (Gonna wash that manright out of our… 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).
.
Well Bottom Blues 