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I walked on the banks of
the tincan banana dock and sat down
under the huge shade of a
Southern Pacific locomotive
to look at the sunset over the
box house hills and cry.
Jack Kerouac sat beside me on a
busted rusty iron pole, compan-
ion, we thought the same
thoughts of the soul, bleak
and blue and sad-eyed,
surrounded by the gnarled steel
roots of trees of machinery.
The oily water on the river
mirrored the red sky, sun sank on top
of final Frisco peaks, no fish
in that stream, no hermit
in those mounts, just ourselves
rheumv-eyed and
hung-over like old bums on the
riverbank, tired and
wily.
Look at the Sunflower, he said,
there was a dead gray shadow
against the sky, big as a man,
sitting dry on top of a
pile of ancient sawdust-
-I rushed up enchanted-it was my
first sunflower, memories
of Blake-my visions-Harlem
and Hells of the Eastern rivers,
bridges clanking Joes Greasy
Sandwiches, dead baby
carriages, black treadless tires
forgotten and unretreaded, the
poem of the riverbank,
condoms & pots, steel
knives, nothing stainless, only
the dank muck and the
razor-sharp artifacts passing
into the past-
and the gray Sunflower poised
against the sunset, crackly bleak
and dusty with the smut and
smog and smoke of older
locomotives in its eye-
corolla of bleary spikes pushed
down and broken like a battered
crown, seeds fallen out of its
face, soon-to-be-toothless
mouth of sunny air, sunrays
obliterated on its hairy
head like a dried wire
spiderweb,
leaves stuck out like arms out of
the stem, gestures from the
sawdust root, broke pieces of
plaster fallen out of the
black twigs, a dead fly in its
ear,
Unholy battered old thing you were,
my sunflower 0 my soul, I
loved you then!
The grime was no man's grime but
death and human locomotives,
all that dress of dust, that veil
of darkened railroad skin, that smog
of cheek, that eyelid of black
mis'ry, that sooty hand
or phallus or protuberance of
artificial worse-than-
dirt-industrial-modern-all that
civilization spot-
ting your crazy golden crown-
and those blear thoughts of death
and dusty loveless eyes and ends
and withered roots below, in
the home-pile of sand and
sawdust, rubber dollar bills,
skin of machinery, the guts
and innards of the weeping
coughing car, the empty
lonely tincans with their rusty
tongues alack, what
more could I name, the smoked
ashes of some cock
cigar, the cunts of
wheelbarrows and the milky breasts
of cars, wornout asses out of
chairs & sphincters of
dynamos-all these
entangled in your mummied
roots-and you there standing
before me in the sunset, all
your glory in your form!
A perfect beauty of a sunflower! a
perfect excellent lovely sun-
flower existence! a sweet
natural eye to the new hip
moon, woke up alive and excited
grasping in the sunset
shadow sunrise golden monthly
breeze!
How many flies buzzed round you
innocent of your grime, while
you cursed the heavens of the
railroad and your flower
soul?
Poor dead flower? when did you
forget you were a flower? When
did you look at your skin and
decide you were an
impotent dirty old locomotive?
the ghost of a locomo-
tive? the specter and shade of
a once powerful mad
American locomotive?
You were never no locomotive,
Sunflower, you were a sunflower!
And you Locomotive, you are
a locomotive, forget me not!
So I grabbed up the skeleton thick
sunflower and stuck it at my
side like a scepter,
and deliver my sermon to my soul,
and Jack's soul too, and anyone
who'll listen,
-We're not our skin of grime, we're
not our dread bleak dusty
imageless locomotive, we're all
golden sunflowers
inside, blessed by our own seed
& hairy naked
accomplishment-bodies growing
into mad black for-
mal sunflowers in the sunset,
spied on by our eyes
under the shadow of the mad
locomotive riverbank
sunset Frisco hilly tincan
evening sitdown vision.
Berkeley,
1955
From Illuminated Poems - illustration Eric Drooker