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 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
Allen Ginsberg, 1955
EB
Kin 152: Yellow Solar Human
I pulse in order to influence
Realizing wisdom
I seal the process of free will
With the solar tone of intention
I am guided by the power of elegance
I am a galactic activation portal
Enter me.
We are using words and images as a bridge to indicate the level of alteration within our self-perception, consciousness and in our own genetic coding that is now occurring.*
*Star Traveler's 13 Moon Almanac of Synchronicity, Galactic Research Institute, Law of Time Press, Ashland, Oregon, 2014-2015.
Svadhistana Chakra
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