There is a story to tell
The story itself is the name
Hey Jack, what's that pulling in?
The SP 1249
Ah, blessed be, it is the 1249
I walked on the banks of the tin can 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 mountains
Just ourselves rheumy-eyed and hungover
Like old bums on the riverbank, tired and wily
"Look at the sunflower," he said
It was a dead gray shadow against the sky
Big as a man sitting dry
Ancient sawdust
I rushed up enchanted
It was my first sunflower
Memories of Blake
My visions
Harlem and hills of the Eastern River
Bridges clanking
Joe's greasy sandwiches
Dead baby carriages
Black treadless tires
Forgotten and unretreaded
The pole of the riverbank
Condoms and pots
Steel knives
Nothing stainless
These date book 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
Sun rays obliterated on its hairy head
Like a dried wire spider web
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
Oh 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 misery
That sooty hand or phallus or protuberance
Of artificial worse than dirt
Industrial, modern
All that civilization spotting your
Crazy golden crown
And those bleary thoughts of death
And dusty loveless eyes and ends
And withered roots below
In the whole pile of sand and sawdust
Rubber dollar bills
Ex-skin of machinery
The guts and the innards of the weepy coffee cars
The empty loopy tin cans with their rusty tongues all knack
What more could I name?
The smoked ashes of some cock cigar
The cunts of wheelbarrows
And the milky breasts of cars
Worn out asses out of chairs
And sphincters of dying
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 life to the new hip boom
Woke up alive and excited
Grasping at the sunset shadow sunrise golden monthly breeze
Cha cha cha cha
Bo ba be ba bo ba be ba bo ba be ba ba ba ba ba ba
Doka daka dika daka dika daka dika dika di
Hey
Hey
Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha
Hey
Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha
Oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh
Eee eee eee eee eee eee eee
How many flies buzzed 'round you
Innocent of your crime
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 figure sunflower
And stuck it at my side like a scepter
And delivered my sermon to my soul
And Jack's soul too
On anyone who'll listen
We're not our skin of grime
We're not our dread, bleak, dusty, imageless locomotive
We're all beautiful golden sunflowers inside
We're blessed by our own seed
And golden 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 tin can evening sit-down vision
So Jack, there she goes
Isn't she beautiful?
The SP 1249
Going maybe forever
But never