I walked out into the garden
starry night and found an emptiness
and green firework flailing up there.
I tried not to cry but heard
myself repeating hollow syllables.
"Happy new year!" he said, and looked
away. "Hmm" I mused. My thoughts tangled, growing and had a novel
of beauty in them, and an empty bed:
sad songs, poetry, tears, dreams;
only words and suffocation.
My mutterings were never truly understood.
I took more night cold beer,
I noticed, while I was drinking it,
it also included sharp ice dead stars.

More drifted into their boats to oblivion
including you. He seemed distant
and I felt bad. More truths
breathed in and out in starry dark black hopefulness.

On the pavement I sat alone, in my mind;
The feelings never leave but fade
Like the sky blending when the day dies,
Though stung hearts have poignant permanence.
Mulling over the One, year- happily so?
Anticipated tears repressed by friendship;
Firm, mechanical devoted fields barren of romance-
But I offered to fill yours with red roses
And you fell deep into the arms of another,
Light-drenched art galleries left me in the dark
And the sky turned black, your back on me,
Blanket of rejection, blank faces to my suicide.
You kept feeding me my private poison
Until immunity rattled my bones and spiked my blood.
Who am I? Who are you? Who is he?
I love that the answers smudge like damp eyes;
Bland memory fails and words stop there.

I dreamt everything turned the colour of yellow dying trees.

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, sur-
     rounded 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 our-
     selves rheumy-eyed and hungover 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 **** 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 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 protuber-
     ance 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
     **** cigar, the ***** of wheelbarrows and the
     milky ******* of cars, wornout ***** 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 rail-
     road 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 ***** old locomo-
     tive? the ghost of a locomotive? the specter and
     shade of a once powerful mad American locomo-
     tive?
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
     beautiful golden sunflowers inside, we're bles-
     sed by our own seed & golden hairy naked ac-
     complishment-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 sit-
     down vision.

                              Berkeley, 1955

She took the pills in the upstairs bedroom
By the light of the winter sun
That shone above the Oak tree
From her tidy, square garden.

Beside her a lonesome photograph
Rested apathetic and unstirred,
But she began to feel nauseous
And could not choke a word.

Her daughter rang the doorbell,
Then, searching for her keys;
Panic stabbed her in her soul,
The Oak tree howled in the breeze.

She left the door ajar,
She let her feet rush upstairs,
She entered the bedroom,
She gasped; then tears.

Later her son was sitting in class
Tapping a rhythm against the desk,
Daydreaming of the one he loved,
Free of grim thought of what he’d hear next.

Did you know the depths of her sadness?
Had you read it in a book?
Many a dull afternoon wasted away
But in her eyes did you ever look?

The grandson looked on silently,
As the sky greyed, his face dull,
At the edge of the car park
Drifting thoughts on hold.

They gathered round her bed
Away from the cruel, bleak outside;
And tiptoed round the real questions,
The old woman began to cry.

I saw you with tangled locks, who looks wide-eyed
Rheumy, back through the glass at nightfall, move
Your devil eyes towards the day
Which rejoices with its approach, shrink away!

The voices spit together, and the stabbing
Feelings listen; all senses turned
Inwards to the bleak emptiness; come forth
The gothic butterflies of my soul!

Come over the sea, and let my heart
Meet your mind, and kiss it softly,
Quickly, until the evening breathes
Its rough, sharp breath down my icy neck

O be closer! Night ends in death; leaves
Its ghostly silhouettes haunting the day
The thorny crown of death tearing my mind,
Screaming like an infinite ghoul

Moonlight, plastered in my mind and
Stamped onto my heart, wherever
The darkness lurks it follows never ending
The starry cycle, choking, haunting.

As soon as the ship had left the harbour,
A bird stopped in the sky and blurring clouds
And said a prayer to the sea
Applauded by sunlight; flashing, blinding.

Couples drank in the small bars
In the colossal house, still soaking,
Girls gazing dreamily
At the far and wide sea.

Oh! the glimmering fish that swam so deep
And hid underneath rocks that did not move.
Cabin beds were unmade
And the sea howled its song,
Low pitched as a moan.

A door banged closed; in lower cabins
The girl waved her arms,
Understood by the sea,
And nature on land everywhere,
No chains, no bounds; everywhere, freedom.

Blood flowed in the water,
A salted abattoir, in the sea
Where windows gazed deep and dark
Blood and life merged. Currents flowed.

Mrs Smythe played jazz piano in the bar,
Whispered flirtations spread
Like the ship moving across the sea.
Romances set out. Palaces were built
In the chaos of storms of the oceanic night.

Every star wrapped up
Across the ocean wide
Shielding themselves from the bright
And the young--- glittering trance
Of burgeoning beautiful love stories.

Every morning after—it’s winter, they spoke---
Foam rolling along the decks
Lightning like cymbals, drumming thunder
Rise and fall, rise and fall
Oh! precious creatures of nautical nights!
Yet secrets hum through warmed hands
Sharing enlightenment they will know forever
But which eludes us now.