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 overthe box house hills and cry.

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Jack Kerouac sat beside me on a busted rusty iron pole, companion, we thought the same thoughtsof the soul, bleak and blue and sad-eyed,surrounded by the gnarled steel roots of trees of machinery.

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The oily water on the river mirrored the red sky, sun sank on top of final Frisco peaks, no fish in that stream, no hermits in those mounts, just ourselves rheumy-eyed  and hungover like old bums on the riverbank, tired and wily.

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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 - 

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and the grey Sunflower poised against the sunset, crackly bleak and dusty with the smut and smog and smoke of olden locomotives in its eye -

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corolla of bleary spies 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,

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leaves stuck out like arms out of the stem, gestures from the sawdust root, broken pieces of plaster fallen out of the black twigs, a dead fly in its ear.

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Unholy battered old thing you were, my sunflower O my soul, I loved you then!

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The grime was no man's grime but death and human locomotives,

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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 spotting your crazy golden crown -

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and those blear thoughts of death and dusty loveless eyes and ends and withered roots below, in the homepile of sand and sawdust rubber dollar bills, sin of machinery, the guts and innards of the weeping coughing car, the empty lonely tincans with their rusty tongues slack, what more could I name, the smoked ashes of some cock cigar, the cunts of wheelbarrows amd the milky breasts of cars,wornout asses out of chairs & sphinecters of dynamos - all these

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entangled in your mummied roots - and you there standing before me in the sunset, all your glory in your form!

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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 sunset shadow sunrise golden monthly breeze!

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How many flies buzzed around you innocent of your grime, while you cursed the heavens of the railroad and your flower soul?

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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 locomotive?  The specter and shade of a once powerful mad American locomotive?

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You were never no locomotive, Sunflower, you were a sunflower!

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And you locomotive, you are a locomotive, forget me not!

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So I grabbed up the skeleton thick sunflower and stuck it at my side like a scepter, 

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and deliver my sermon to my soul, and Jack's soul too, and anyone who'll listen,

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We're not our skin of grime, we're not our our dread bleakdusty imageless locomotive,we're all beautiful golden sunflowers inside, we're blessed by our own seed & 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 tincan evening sitdown vision.

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Ginsberg 1955

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