nature
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August Elderberries
August elderberriesengorged with summer begging to be plucked Continue reading
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Game Over
If the AI revolution brings about an age of abundance, as Elon Musk has begun to suggest lest we bring out the guillotine, and no one goes hungry or burns with avarice; if the computers not only cure all our diseases and extend our lives but solve every puzzling mathematical theorem and scientific mystery for… Continue reading
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Oh! That Holy Ghost!
They’re dead to me, the judgemental ones—Bad tempered sky daddy and even his gentle sonif He will one day come back riding Wrath likea fifth horse of the Rome-gone-wrong apocalypse.But Oh! That Holy Ghost!She comes to me on colorful wings, speaking in the tongues of susurration, of bird song and call.And I am her evangelist,… Continue reading
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Portal
Some days the forest is not far enough. I can still hear the cars speeding past just outside the gate and the distant rumble of the interstate that bisects the park. It is too close to what troubles, to what waits later, and chances are I have a list of things to do on the… Continue reading
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Welcome, you spirits
Latin: “Sunt mihi Dei Acherontis propitii! Valeat numen triplex Jehovae! Ignis, aeris, aquae, terrae spiritus, Salvete!” Translation: “May the gods of Acheron be favorable to me! Farewell to the threefold spirit of Jehovah — the Trinity! Welcome, you spirits of fire, air, water, and earth!” —Czeslaw Miłosz’ adaptation of the invocation from Goethe’s Faust. I… Continue reading
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Not a Demon-Haunted World
Not a demon-haunted worldof the astronomer’s warningbut one spirit informed,knowing we are the conscious universelooking at ourselvesin the mystery of a treeunmediated by machines Continue reading
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The Only Worthy Lotus
Walking is meditation if it is morning chorus and kaleidoscopic green. Not stillness. Not silence. Not transcendence. Follow instead the breath of everything. I don’t want to escape this world but instead to live deeply within it. I don’t want to approach the lotus unless I can wade in to admire it. Walk widdershins around… Continue reading
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Return to Scout Island
Today was the first time I set foot on Scout Island in City Park since the 1960s. I had some unpleasant childhood experiences there: the Cub Scout den camp out when I burned myself on the Coleman lantern and my father and Uncle decided to treat it by pouring cold Dixie beer onto it, and… Continue reading
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What is the Ph of forest?
What is the Ph of forest when it’s littered with broken concrete returning to its elements: The highly-alkaline calcium hydroxide; the toxic Arsenic, Barium, Lead, and Mercury? Does someone monitor this in the arboretum, or is this place meant as a glimpse of the post-human world, the apocalyptic blossom of green, when the wild will… Continue reading
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consider yourself a ghost
You got to be a spirit. Don’t be no ghost — Rastaman the Griot consider yourself a ghost alone in the woods without other people television phone internetwhile life of all kinds continuesaround you in green and brownblossom color and bird song assomething from a dream this dream see your self as spirit in a… 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).
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Well Bottom Blues 