'We’re not our skin
of grime...we’re
golden sunflowers inside...'
Don't be alarmed by the length of this prose poem (or the somewhat graphic language), by the
best-known of the Beat poets, Allen Ginsberg. Within the seeming rambling, there is wisdom.
Sunflower Sutra - Allen Ginsberg
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, 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 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
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 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 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
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 dread bleak dusty imageless locomotives, we’re
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 own eyes under the shadow of the mad locomotive
riverbank sunset Frisco hilly tincan evening sitdown vision.
