Sunflower Sutra

I walked on the banks of the tin can banana dock
And sat down under the huge shade of the 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, companion
We thought the same thoughts of the soul
Bleak and blue and sad eyed
Surrounded by the gnarled steel roots of the tree of machinery
The oily water in the mir— in 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, rheumy-eyed and
Hungover 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 Joe's greasy sandwiches
Dead baby carriages, black treadless tires forgotten and unretreaded
The poem of the riverbank, condoms in 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 olden locomotives in its eye

Coral 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 of the 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 oh my soul
I loved you then

That 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 misery
That sooty hand or phallus or protuberance of
Artificial worse than dirt industrial modern
All that civilization spotting 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 tin cans 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
The worn-out asses out of chairs and 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 sunflower existence
A sweet natural eye to the new hip moon

Woke up alive and excited grasping in the black
Light shadow golden sunrise sunset 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 that you were a flower?
When did you look at your skin and decide
You were an impotent dirty old locomotive?
The ghost of a locomotive
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 beautiful golden sunflowers inside

We are blessed by our own seed
And golden hairy naked accomplishment bodies
Growing into mad black formal sunflowers in the sunset
Spied on by our eyes
Under the shadow of the mad locomotive riverbank
Sunset Frisco hilly tin can evening sit-down vision