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 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 river-
           bank, 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 civiliza
           tion 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 exis-
            tence! 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 locomo-
            tive? 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 sitdown vision.