Poem by Irwin Allen Ginsberg

Sunflower Sutra

I walked on the banks of the tincan banana dock and sat down under the 
huge shade of a Southern Pacific locomotive to look for 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 trees of machinery. The only 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 rheumy-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 olden 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 O 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 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 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 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 sunset shadow sunrise golden monthly breeze! How many flies buzzed 
round you innocent of your grime, while you cursed the heavens of your 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 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 golden 
sunflowers inside, blessed by our own seed & 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 

1. Song
2. America

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