This page is for the "Elite" poets, poem, sonnet, and what-not. For the big boys, the classic Sonneteers, Satirists, Romantics, Modernists, New York school, and heck, maybe a little Beat (by Allen Gins what's his face, just kidding :) )

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 Sand-

wiches, 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 loco-

motives 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--indus-

trial--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 tin-

cans with their rusty tongues alack, what more could I name,

the smoked ashes of some cock cigar, the cunts of wheel-

barrows 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

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 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 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 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.

- Berkeley, 1955

June 24th: "Song" (Allen Ginsberg)
Week Of May 9th: "The Night Has a Thousand Eyes" (Francis William Bourdillon)
Week Of May 2nd: "That Time of Year" (William Shakespeare)
Week Of April 25th: Didn't post one, sue me!! :)
Week Of April 18th: "Raise Me Up, Lord" (Miguel De Guevara)
Week Of April 11th: "Not In Vain" (Dickinson, Emily)
Week Of April 4th: "The Road Not Taken" (Frost, Robert)

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