Politics
-
To defeat LLM AI Surveillance
We must underfuck the turnbuckles of authority and have lunch tomorrow at the usual placeholder pancake makeup sex or dinner at six and sevens and nines at the tortilla invasion replacement place the package and detonate dandelions if a fluff cloud of margaritas sound gang bang whang dang doodle 13 where chips are Free Mumia. Continue reading
-
2025
On The Centennial of Benito Mussolini’s Assumption of Dictatorial Powers in 1925 let us string piano wire like holiday tinsel and hang memorial ornaments to resistance, dangle the masked fatigue green monsters by their ankles while singing the carol of the partisan, crack poppers heard round the world and wear paper tricorn hats of Lexington Continue reading
-
We are here to laugh at the odds
“For those who believe in God, most of the big questions are answered. But for those of us who can’t readily accept the God formula, the big answers don’t remain stonewritten. We adjust to new conditions and discoveries. We are pliable. Love need not be a command or faith a dictum. I am my own Continue reading
-
Museum of the Broken Heart
Apologies to Andy YoungYour poems. of course, are brilliantMy star, right now, is not Trying to read another’s grief fine lines on dull paper through the fog the smoke of a nation in flames I think instead I’ll gather up all my Everett Maddox to read by the sports TV light at the bar around Continue reading
-
Enemy of the Wrong People
I’ve never requested my FBI file but I’m pretty sure it goes back over 50 years to my freshman year in high school. Our service class was a comparison between the US and Soviet system. And there was a model UN. I was assigned Taiwan, and decided instead in 1971 to represent the People’s Republic Continue reading
-
Don’t Look Away
“To be an artist means never to avert one’s eyes.” ~ Akira Kurosawa Most of the visual artists I know are attuned to beauty. The innocence of childhood very deep inside will always be fascinated by a flower. The market has something to say about this. Tourists browsing Jackson Square do not come here for Continue reading
-
NEWS FLASH: BIDEN WITHDRAWS
Glass shatters in an instantShards marked in trails of bloodHousekeeping fled the country The men folk circle up a posseFondling oily unconcealed carryAnd their obsolete typewriters Promote the show’s last runThe Last Candidate is hoistedOn a flag-draped media scaffold The menfolk with press cardsIn the brim of grandfather’s hatIssue confusing directions Carefully chosen mob Continue reading
-
US Christianity is Cruelty
I have tried to keep politics off this page, but a recent post by one of my US Senators, Bill Cassidy, just blew a 50 amp fuse. He supports the Blood Red states that rejected federal aid for summer meals for poor kids who don’t get school lunches or. breakfasts for months. He argued “compassion Continue reading
-
Why I did not grow more conservative with age
More on this after I finish organizing my thoughts. Writers are among the most sensitive, most intellectually anarchic, most representative, most probing of artists. The writer’s ability to imagine what is not the self, to familiarize the strange, & to mystify the familiar—all this is the test of her or his power. — Toni Morrison Continue reading
-
The Fall of the Towers
YOU ARE TRAPPED IN THAT BRIGHT MOMENTWHERE YOU LEARNED YOUR DOOM— Samuel R. Delaney in City of a Thousand Suns Fifteen years ago I found something of promise in that quote from Delaney’s novel about a society shattered by the discovery that all of their foundational truths were lies, in the promise of the rebuilding in 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).
.
Well Bottom Blues 