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The elephant is malcontented. Captivityin my imagination is stultifying. They pacerelentlessly, trumpeting and tramplingtheir straw littered concrete savannah. I was told not to think of them, and they would not trouble my nights butthey’re as present as not-thinking-about-them makes them out to be because they are real. We've met and I have gently touched their […]
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, […]
Thinking of updating my bio. Mark Folse is a UHF poetry ghost drifting in from the 20th century, transparent as the thin banker paper of old Norton Anthologies and just as relevant to today’s million-transistors-to-the inch Poetry Industrial Complex. He echoes 60+ years of reading like a theremin humming Tennyson. He idolizes Wallace Stevens and […]
Colonialism is a defining political framework of our time. I’m trying to consider my own family line through that lens. At one time I was inclined to call Johan Jacob Folse a settler rather than a colonist, but Likud Israel has poisoned the word settler. In my view Bienville and John Law were the colonizers, […]
XVII WHERE, in what blessedly-watered gardens, on what trees Out of what tenderly unleaved bloom, Do the exotic fruits of consolation ripen? These Delicious fruits, of which perhaps one In the trampled meadow of your poverty, you find. From time to time you wonder over the fruit,— its size, Over its soundness, the smoothness of […]
She can’t bend her aging body to love like that, but next to her in bed I just lay my cheek on her arm and settle in,skin to skin, and she lays her cheekon my head and at my age that’s practically skin to skin and we just settle in, some painter’s portrait of love,exploring […]
Was it really Him in that pearlescent robe, gold belted with a halo in the spotlight shadow? Is there a Bible School Jesus and a Vegas Jesus? He told me I could kick because he’s the higher power that rules over shaky basements of midnight coffee. I’m shivering with the need-a-pill chills and squinting at […]
Gay zoned, a particular space in the friend zone in which she says, I loved my gay friends. It was so safe there. You could be yourself. You could be sexy without worrying about someone trying to get into your pants. She said this after I confessed again it wasn’t her cheek or forehead I […]
(16) Writing poetry is an unnatural act — Elizabeth BishopNothing kinky. Think cuddles: the collapseof two into one, of that one into comfort:the innocent–the long hug, the movie couch–and the afterwards, coming back from blisswhere union is fully consummated by touchskin to skin, hands measuring from shoulder to hip the full depth of desire, while […]
I was a dateless and frustrated kid, only getting a little lucky if we both were drunk, which started so damn young when I was a teenager as if at once to ease and to drown adolescence. I was spectrally bashful like a ghost around young women and spending adolescence in an all boy’s school […]
