cryptic envelopment
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His Raptures
so many,I had not thought death had undone so many. — T.S. Eliot, “The Wasteland” Not death but that fine madness, though so many ended their own lives: John Berryman, Anne Sexton, Delmore Schwartz. I have lied about suicidal ideation to psych although that has mostly been a creative excersise. Have you ever thought: stop Continue reading
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It’s not the coffee
I am Captain Cortisol, The Amazingly Electric Man I start my day with the Heebie Jeebees and coffee. Imagine the visible veins in your skin as wiring now run an unpleasant current through yourselfas if your whole body was an extension of your tongue and you’ve just put that nine volt battery on. It’s that Continue reading
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It’s time to take Anxiety for a walk
It’s time to take Anxiety for a walk. He won’t take a leash; she only comes when I don’t call; to calm us both we need to retreat to the trees. This is my hof, my temple, my cathedral.Not gods exactly but simultaneously chthonic and a partof the heavens. Tree of Life Genesis and RevelationsKalpavriksha Continue reading
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Crow Cousins
The crows come first alone or a pair but quickly gather in dozens when I cast handfuls of cheap cat food. I have a spot walk to the front of the park through the old growth live oaks where I feed them, beneath to especially large trees where the ground is mostly bare from the Continue reading
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I’m Auto-Tuned Out
I’m Auto-Tuned Out I have a voice that is not auto-tunedto the popular. Stanzas: what’s upwith that? And rhyme sometimes.Blame that Bob Dylan character,and Ian Anderson. And, oh, all those Norton Anthologies, starting us onVol. 1 so young and impressionable.I can carry a note but my ear is tunedto the page, however I might humas Continue reading
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Not Drunk Unless
Not drunk unless on leafbreath and godswink, my path doesn’t stagger; it wanders with care, following some loose rules about how I pass by, under the boughs of and around certain trees, usually widdershins, compassing the roots and boles and others bowing for a benediction where the arch of branches buttress the sky. The Crow Continue reading
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The Conga Beat of Wings
I was getting the side eye from birders in the Couterie Forest Arboretum yesterday for my drumming playinv on a small speaker on the strap of my water bottle. Little do they know I startled a hawk the other day turning a bend, long after they would have heard the drumming. Everything in that wood Continue reading
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Spin the (pharmacy) bottle
The medication for REM sleep disorder, what leads me to occasionally smack Patrice with my left arm as I reach out to catch a baseball or assume yoga positions while asleep, foregrounds my amazing Technicolor dreamscape which I jokingly refer to as the Chase Light Calliope Fun House of Madness. It is overriding another medication Continue reading
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That Bright Moment
YOU ARE TRAPPED IN THAT BRIGHT MOMENTWHERE YOU LEARNED YOUR DOOM— Samuel R. Delaney in City of a Thousand Suns In Delaney’s novella trilogy Fall of the Towers the characters must confront the mass, simultaneous discovery by an entire society that a key assumption about their lives–that there was an enemy beyond the barrier; that 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 