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Funny Urban Fantasy Inspirational

American Sorrel: A Book of Prologues and Poems.



Poet (n): ballad-monger, bard, goliard, metrician, metrist, minnesinger, poetaster, rimer, rimestar, scoppe, scop, skald.



The poet's debut book of poems. The first review: "An extremely extravagant sop."


Books and poems and poems and books. They can be extremely difficult to extrapolate from the world. Be they books, poems, books of poems, books on poems, poems about books, poems in books.

They can, sometimes, be extremely difficult to coax out of the world.


Try to coax a hardcover Mailer out of the world, easiest thing, piece a cake, they're everywhere and anywhere. Try to coax a Camus hardcover, keep looking. He's for the kiddies. Silly rabbit. Paper them backs back, those paperback strangers, they're everywhere. Now, it should be the other way around. But, that's the way it goes.


The poet, the Los Angeles poet, he walks about these days, those days, many-a-day, writing poetry. He writes poems.


Some of the poems he's written, why: here they are, split and entuned, published and booned, as it were. These poems were originally taken from his Spring 2021 notepads. He's collected them into a book of poetry which he's given the title AMERICAN SORREL: A Book of Prologues and Poems. Published kindly on his Reedsy blog. And here ends this prologue: to sway unto another.



AMERICAN SORREL

A Book of Prologues and Poems by J. Storbakken


The First Prologue: A Little India

It must have been the early winter sometime because I remember it was cold that night I met Pretty (facetious), spelled correctly: Priti. I was heading back to Boyle Heights where my then girlfriend was waiting in her garage-space apartment of sorts. Priti was standing over by the edge of the platform and I was leaning back against a pillar, there under the rainbow spangled flavors of the chequered walls and ceilings in the North Hollywood metro station, and I was leaning there thinking to myself sweetly and just for-the-moment how fun it was to read Tolstoy’s War and Peace during those times sitting cross legged on the chair in the small kitchen-space while my gal cooked meager-beautiful and tasty meals for us like Ratatouille from the movie and spaghetti and cookies and pie, and also thinking about which western movie would we watch that very night or would it be a zombie film and would the few Red Bulls I drank be a cause for or an implement away from premature jacks come later in her highly-pillowed bed-cot (she was economic in more ways than one)? Getting on the train Priti and I ended up boarding near each other, and I held my forefinger in the page I was on in W&P and walked in, a little self-consciously (you know how I am with the girls) since she sat only a few seats away. She seemed to emanate the touristy scent. Definitely visiting. It’s just something in the feel of the person, they give off a theme-park vibrations, like, “which ride next?” “Where’s the bathroom?” “Woah look at that!” “I’m getting tired!” “I need a coffee and a corn dog!” “What the fuck is a fastpass and who has the crumbly map?” and such fallacies and well-meaning thoughts and fair considerations. I got off and went about my way, taking the scenic route through Little Tokyo, and ended up running into her an hour later. It was well night by then. She was standing outside the Double Tree reception driveway, and she looked definitely very lost this time. Not just a fun, gaily tourist, but now a lost visitor. It showed on her face and her demeanor of stance on the sidewalk there. Frustration in the lays of the elbow. I was walking by on the sidewalk noticing this, and I asked her gently, “Can I show you the way somewhere, point ya somewhere?” She looked at me right in the eyes, looked down, said nothing, and just then two cars across the street began honking loudly and I thought impertinently at each other, and she looked down at her phone as they were having at each other, then looked up and said, “I’m trying to find my Uber driver,” she looked back down, “he said he’s here by now.” Her accent was evidently Indian, but not really so. There was something else, not just the Americanized phonetics of their many graces in her tone and style. She looked about the street for her ride, and I too looked around. “You sure he said he’s here?” I asked, for some reason unsure about the timing being late or belated, I don’t know. “Yeah,” she swiped around on her phone, “he said he was.” She showed me the message. I was prepared to leave but she was giving signs that due to her not having any clue where she was in the to her foreign city and me obviously being a local who seemed OK I was welcome to stay around until she was safely on her way, or something like that. I’m no creep, that is, unless, you’re my neighbor and you don’t give me my space or something like that, you know. Anyway, we both continued looking around for an Uber, smiling at the street and each other, looking for that blank-faced sedan cockpitter with the ignorance of a High School footballer looking for his mother in the stands, you know, driving along in the parking zone like an idiot. I decided to introduce myself, and she went on unphased, almost as if she didn’t hear me, looking down at her phone. “Oh, uh, Priti.” A smile bolted and melted over her face for one moment, a sweet little moment filled with what seemed to me to be a girlish self- consciousness, her knowing the simple English associations commonly gilded aboard her common-someplace name. I smiled, too. Couldn’t help it. And just as she proceeded to tell me about her being from New Delhi and moving to Australia as a child, her Uber driver scooted up to the curb. I told her, as she was getting in, how I had been in Delhi only just the year prior. Her eyes smiled, as she fimbled through her purse, and then her whole face smiled. She waved swiftly and then turned away, closing the cardoor. I watched them drive off with sweet relief. But that was some time ago, and now I’m sitting in the hidden-away garden hidden a few stories above street-level, over Los Angeles St., corner at 2nd Street, overlaying the northwest entrance of the Double Tree Little Tokyo, behind the café and the waterfalls and the pond, taking a quick break behind the café and the waterfall to watch the Koi and think back about Priti and take the short, sweet time to scribble down a few OK Pomes, I think.


OK POME 1

Nobody jokes about

The way life poses for us (though everybody jokes about the way we pose for life) I mean, just look at it,

Posing away.

I’m life, live up to my

Standards of living, bellyfulls, propscooters, poopscoots, & Taco-lavaflows,

And make more cash more cash more cash flow

More & more

OK, this isn’t absolutely hilarious to anybody?

Uncle 'o mine once joked to me: watch out for them tricksters.

I told him, hey, just tell them a joke, and they'll go.

I told him I tell them good morning in the evening and goodevening in the morning. Thas' all.


OK POME 2

Favourite

Stroll

Path in the garden once hidden,

Twice behind fake glass-lanced windows: a shiny shoeshine, come redlight,

Come red night.

OK.

do you ever see your own

Shadow laid out there in the

grass slipped off like a picnic blanket

smelt from a fair-folled look’t ‘im 

outline of another Rushmore

shapely nose, high cliff,

shadowy all over the yassyass, grass, I sometimes see my

Shadow & think of

yesterday lines, lines which have stayed.


OK POME 3 & 4 & 5 & 6

I’ve found a garden

Somewhere

Where around above the L.A. streets I once met a woman who was visiting from Melbourne, Australia.

Not sure how, wandered in

Remembered who I was

& wrote down a few wandersome memories of the girl really named Priti 

and lead me myself here to this decanter’s range of bridge,

An epic to peacefully folly the scene where one’ll find Dante &

I just find an itch in my wranglers-ée


OK POME & 7

March 15, 2021, now meet Bishop Camel.

POME BISHOP CAMEL TAKE 1

Bishop Camel, how do you get a binoculars through the eye of a needle? The sea.

Bishop Camel, how do you get a Nintendo 64 through the eye of a needle? Unplug it.

Bishop Camel stepped off of the page

(see picture here)

I said, “Ah, sir, sir....”

“Yes?”

“Come back my good sir.”

“My good sir I’ve only just arrived.”

“But you’re a comic strip not a naïve narrator nor a prosy pedagogue get back on the strip of longpage and there he goes....”

Now introducing, Sir Bishop Camel.

(see his Camellyness here)

Bishop Camel, how do you get a tree through the eye of a needle?

Find an Irishman and ask him to count to three or thirty-three.

Bishop Camel, how can I bring my bike through that eye of a needle there? Fuck your bike, kid.

(Bishop Camel grabbing bike and chucking it in One Whallop over the bridge)

Bishop Camel, I wrote a short story called “L.A. Nooks” back before I crisscorssetted over the 101 while I was still back wandering and sitting stations over in Union Station’s adventagion, “L.A. Nooks”, can I send it thru the eye of the needle?

Let me see it. (Shows....)

A faint wind fondled the potted plants, a row of three benches on either side leading to the fountain at the center of the wallspace sat stolid, flowing, breaching the silence with its ethereal motion of toil and fluid. She was changing her socks, sitting propped there on the lip of the fountain’s broad gray cast....

It shows.

Bishop Camel, how do I fit my ego through the eye of a needle?

Oh boy, ask Siri.

Siri, how do I-

You’ve got mail.

Siri, how-

You’ve got e-mail.

Siri, how do I fit-

You’ve got ego in your mail and maile in your ego. 

Bishop Camel, how do you keep a good surprise hidden?

Force it, then they’ll not even have a chance at taking it and understanding it themselves, and it will stay hidden until the right time comes along, and poof, they’ve found themselves back in a garden seething with beauty and birdsong and the Sun. One given blueprint blupent of a long, lazy string of blue afternoons. Strolls, too. Footpaths. And the little greaser with the dyed hair (weekly, monthly, sometimes more than once in the stretch of one day) who used to wait up for me in the garage in Boyle Heights cooking little dinners for us has by this time around this wintertime moved back in with her father up in snowcountry Vermont. More on that, nope. Bop. Fin. Tawdrystomped, stamped, and delivered on the tawny taps.




The Second Prologue: A Love for Ann

The following poems were written on the day of March 15, 2021, immediately after I experienced the sudden and unwarranted flash of a sentimental and heavenly vision of Ann Charters while stepping onto a bus. I will admit that a few weeks prior to this event I had been reading through her biography of Kerouac. I was downtown when it happened. Simply stepping up onto a bus. I was moved, naturally, I think, to write down immediately all that came to me, in the first and only thing I had on hand: a copy of Lord Byron’s Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage.

And though I consider it high nigh sacrilegious to write in the pages of any book I own, since it would devalue the books in the same ways tired lovers like to devalue their limpid flings in retrospection, it was of the very utmost unimportance that I jotted this small book of pomes down, if only to cast its Americanized Sorrel out into the fields.

....warin



POME 1

I can only really see my father when he is bleeding. Soft American Sorrel, from yesterday. Poème: nombre.

Nombe (me trying to say the worin numb in my flout-lipped & madeup language, wherein worin is word).

Yellow breakfasts.

Knack knak for the busyness

Krept past Churchyard bin

In which I threw Sartre’s Saint Genet tired of languages and liaisons

Tired of trying to stand under (telephonepoles)

that Wissen

And now brilliantrain- morn & day- daylight

Bright by the evening ‘gain,

Gowin’ over the river, thrown down C. Chavez cool and circular, 

Sea calls like

Whiver to?


POME 2

Sereneti Ferlinghetti (March 24, 1919 - February 22, 2021) bees race up until noonsons

Here in Hollywood vine respite, Innisfree,

Some of the oceanside your Dharma,

-kisstaken kin of tho Doo,

And once your- your book of the boardwalk of those Coney Island colors,

Inspired a young poet in the Oregon woods to write about his fernbed, his meditation

And a Scooby Doo Proustian hairdo.

Man in wheelchair comes rollin’ rags up sidewalk. Walk.

Thrift on the courtly, court on sunset held, this is Broadway,

Walkin down to Skid

Row,

Done it like eight times, grab me a pack, what kind she asks, M. Reds-

OAD ORK HEAD

The fork of beefsteak HareIndian boozeblu

Lean back into the sunset and so see there ROAD WORK AHEAD

Child on shoulders wedded on shoulders of her Father, Time

& wilted noon

Streetlights: orange, blu


POME 3

Used Beat Pomeaid,

Downtown Los Angeles & Ann in the wind & onthemind,

Her pearfeltwhetting inward blackness sudden shere-eyes seen there myne eye clamped closed, time,

Dearest Charting map of historical sare Full of tranced nuance,

Kept on charter,

love love love

She’s close, she’s close- marruh.

Pershing Building

No I don’t ipod-drama my togo blogs with much,

& to lookup high windows

To looin’ look

High windows

Is nothing, noviews there,

I once stood on the Vegas Strip on the Globe: Thissun’,

Musicdomed forever,

Confettooned and blu, too

& with 4 cigarettes, & shoulders that were too rounded, & on & on: railroad tracks on American Sorrelfields.


POME 4

Quothing Shakespeare aloud

Better out alight street sidewalks

Beneath orange lights and therebound

Is a real spell’s summons- magic fright, try it there,

Really real if recitalesqued outloud, morphic aesthetic resonance if you will, something happens, it does something,

Wind, soft and chiek-lisped,

Wind says biteme, another evening of

Nothing first of what?

& I think this may be the morphic train Sheldrake pushed under

(like, aware, ridden: like I rode the sacral inspiration from Ti Jean- or was that only because I’m a walking cliché? An orange juice thicket betimes beside of a car lot? The juiciest unmoth? A scratch, a jacket)

A Poème: looking in the parked car

Passing, there’s a misshapen white t-shirt shoved over the driver’s seat, and me walking up thinking (looking in its supreme darkness and natural night Darknessense

Not of tint nor false shade),

“Is that a person? Is that a person?”

& thinking is that Kerouac Sainthood I wander and cackle around an effect of morphic resonance?

& Is this mysterious (Ach-déjà vu!) morphic resonance a play of words on the air which we just

hear, in this history and on this chase and on this bluglobe of likenesses?....


POMES 5 & 6

Then here & now, after tall,

Me saying

That I’m just takin’ it easy, not plannin’,

& really it’s the same as spending all that time shooting for the house and the job and the billpay and the traveling and the vet bill and the Golden State entries and the orange, hill-bound roman candlelights, citylights, still just another dragged-on starry-eyed pink dusk-tomb.

Go blu.

Steady. Globe, frittered, tilted, moon crested. Wassailed. Twilit under the sidewalk-lifted skirts

And high noontime, too. Breathren. Bon. Worinspade.

It’s Mamma’s birthday tomorrow, and it’s gonna be sunny.

(& it is no contrivance of mine or theirs

That when I there pass a strange luminescence of a lost butt still on a variable there on the sidewalk

embers catch

Little wind, no one about and I wonder to myself (this is really what I wondered to myself)

“Is that Dr. Sax’s?”

& I walk into the night,

Slick with the silently rained & the Poème Pomeaid worin and so on into the Great American darknesst....)


POME 7

Goodbye: sidewalks, stars, pomes

Back to back to back Poèmes & Victor Hugo’s messout gilded and fluttering in cycles-

GONE WITH THE WIND without Scott Fitzgerald 

Is only Rhett Butler’s recitalled, "frankly."


May 23, 2021 06:44

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1 comment

J. Storbakken
03:31 May 24, 2021

An extremely extravagant sop.

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