Poems by Allen Ginsberg (1926-1997)

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.

Berkeley, 1955