cryptic envelopment
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The Price of Humanity
I am increasingly comfortable with the karmic cost of my unbridled hate for MAGA. My father was not a bad man; certainly not an evil man. I wish for everyone MAGA from Trump on down, all of them, what my father wished for the Nazis in Belgium in 1944: in service to the ideals of… Continue reading
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THIS SPECIES OF MADNESS
THIS SPECIESOF MADNESS This species of madnessWhich isn’t just talentGleams in the dark reachesOf my thinking self Without bringing me happiness.There is always, in the city,Clear or cloudy skies, but in meI don’t know what there is. —Fernandi Pessoa 6 OCTOBER 1926 Continue reading
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Searching for a voice for a new humanism in Jeffers
I’m descending into the The Selected Poems of Robinson Jeffers (758 pages) just as 11 years ago about this time I was deep into the Cantos of Ezra Pound at Castle Brunnenburg. I went to the castle as a strange holiday celebrating completion of the B.A. in English literature started almost 40 years earlier. The… Continue reading
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Conquer the Impossible
It was impossible to make it through the tragedy Without poetry. — Joy Harjo Continue reading
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Drunk Bigots Blowing Shit Up
My German and French Acadian people, who arrived 50 years before the “American” revolution, were sold to “America” a century after they arrived here, unconsulted, along with the slaves in the fields and the “merciless Indian Savages” who showed the founders true democracy and were crushed for it. All just another colonial commodity to the… Continue reading
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We Live in Smoke
we live in smoke not as the ancestors did old stories around the fire passing a pipe, the dark flavor of roasted meat we suck the unburnt carbon of our world as if we each just lit a cigarette Continue reading
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Debussy
Reading Federico Garcia Lorca in the woods. Continue reading
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Looks Like It Might Be Fixin’ To Storm Rag
Where should we direct our prayers now that the government is decommissioning hurricane weather satellites? I don’t do Catholic anymore so the city’s Lady of Prompt Succor is out. And many people in the United Christian States of America think that idolatry. Burnt offerings seem a bit much in our new heat regime, although the… Continue reading
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Everybody Loves Rilke
Them: Rilke. Me: Really? Everybody loves Rilke. This seems to be a universal phenomenon. It’s like the attachment you still have to the first person you fucked with mutual pleasure as a teenager. A lover, not a girlfriend or a barroom romance. I get it. He speaks to the soul with an overwhelming and fluent… Continue reading
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Weight of Witness
I DON’T KNOW HOW MANYSOULS I HAVEFernando Pessoa I don’t know how many souls I have.I’ve changed at every moment.I always feel self-estranged.I’ve never seen or found myself.From being so much, I have only soul.A man who has soul has no calm.A man who sees is just what he sees.A man who feels is not… 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 