WEBVTT

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"Sunflower Sutra."

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Here, I began to attempt to
combine the early newspaper

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East journalistic preoccupation
with facts from William Carlos

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Williams, with Kerouac's idea
of a fast, emotive writing,

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with my own Hebrew soul.

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I walked on the banks of
the tin can banana dock

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and sat down under the huge
shade of a Southern Pacific

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locomotive to look at the
sunset over the box house house

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hills and cry.

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Jack Kerouac sat beside
me on a busted, rusty iron

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pole, companion.

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We thought the same
thoughts of the souls,

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bleak and blue and sad eyes
surrounded by the gnarled steel

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roots of trees of machinery.

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The oily water on the
river mirrored the red sky.

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Sun sank on top of
final Frisco peaks.

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No fish in that stream.

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No hermits in those mounts.

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Just ourselves, roomy-eyed
and hung over like old bums

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on the riverbank,
tired and wily.

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Look at the sunflower, he said.

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It was a dead, gray shadow
against the sky, big as a man,

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sitting dry on top of a
pile of ancient sawdust.

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I rushed up and chanted.

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It was my first sunflower.

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Memories of Blake,
my vision, Harlem,

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and hells of the Eastern
rivers, bridges clanking,

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Joe's Greasy Sandwiches,
dead baby carriages,

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black, treadless tires
forgotten and unretreaded,

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the poems of the
riverbank, condoms and pot.

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Steel knives.

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Nothing stainless.

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Only the dank muck and
the razor sharp artifacts

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passing into the past.

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And the gray sunflower poised
against the sunset, crackly,

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bleak, and dusty with the smut
and smog and smoke of olden

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locomotives in its eye,
corolla of bleary spikes

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pushed down and broken
like a battered crown.

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Seeds fallen out of
its face, soon to be

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toothless mouth of sunny air.

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Sun rays obliterated on his
hairy head like a dried wire

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spiderweb.

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Leaves stuck out like
arms out of the stem.

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Gestures from the sawdust roots.

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Broke pieces of plaster
fallen out of the black twigs.

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A dead fly in his ear.

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Unholy, battered
old thing you were.

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My sunflower, oh my soul.

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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,

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that smog of cheek, that
eyelid of black misery,

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that sooty hand, or
phallus, or protuberance

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of artificial worse-than-dirt,
industrial, modern.

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All that civilization spotting
your crazy, golden crown.

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And those bleary thoughts
of death and dusty loveless

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eyes and ends and withered roots
below in the home pile of sand

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and sawdust, rubber dollar
bills, skin of machinery,

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the guts and innards of
the weeping, coughing car,

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the empty lonely tin cans with
their rusty tongues alack.

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What more could I name?

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The smoke ashes of
some cock cigar,

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the cunts of wheelbarrows and
the milky breaths of cars,

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worn out asses out of chairs
and sphincters of dynamos.

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All these entangled
in your roots.

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And you there standing
before me in the sunset,

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all your glory in your form a
perfect beauty of a sunflower.

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A perfect, excellent,
lovely sunflower existence.

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A sweet and natural eye
to the new, hip moon.

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Woke up alive and excited,
grasping in the sunset.

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Shadow.

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Sunrise.

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Golden monthly breeze.

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How many flies buzz around
you, innocent of your grime

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while you curse the heavens of
the railroad and your flower

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soul.

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Poor, dead flower.

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When did you forget
you were a flower?

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When did you look at
your skin and decide

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you were an impotent,
dirty, old locomotive?

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The ghost of a locomotive?

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The specter and shade of a
once powerful mad, American

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locomotive?

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You will never know
locomotive, sunflower.

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You are a sunflower.

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And you, locomotive,
you are a locomotive.

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Forget me not.

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So I grabbed up the
skeleton-thick sunflower

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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,

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and anyone who will listen.

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We are not our skin
of grime, we're

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not dread bleak dusty,
imageless locomotive.

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We're all beautiful
golden sunflowers inside.

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We're blessed by our own seed,
and golden, hairy, naked,

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accomplishment bodies growing in
the mad black formal sunflowers

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in the sunset,
spied on by our eyes

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under the shadow of the
mad locomotive riverbank

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sunset Frisco hilly tin can,
evening, sit down, vision.

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[APPLAUSE]

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