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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
Ken Pepiton Mar 2023
Genesis
****** and his cities,
Peleg the earthquake,

cities of crafts and exchange

waste disposal, chaos control
ordinal first to last sequence
father, physical strong, less curious
mother, fragile smaller, more observant.

Plural spiritual entities, Elohim, watchers,
applications of reason, reporting events.

Balance demonstrated with spinning
and flipping throwing things,
fitting thing piece to piece cunning spun
framing weaving
loose and taut, twanging
whistle, whine howl yells bells song

Eventual progress, time out of mind, slow
and steady,
patient, put down, put up, leaning, pushing
pulling, windwise rushing in, to fill the empty

Mind, imageless, no holds, no solidity,
all is spirit, no atoms even, perhaps, not even,
quarkish pairs of ups or downs that spin
on points in ever after solid state called
Heaven, the firmamental place where none was.

Higg's Field.
Unknown known matter and energy, we know.
We know something power enough to seem matter,
exists,
beyond our individuated mind's grasp.
Okeh.

Spread so as we may imagine, when itself began
with the initial edges, or edge, it would be, inside
any bubble-edge is inside,
they say outside is unimaginable

flat out planed point of anything
pounded thin as any bubble wall,
-blood-brain boundary, shocking discovery

yes, as with point spreads stretched to firm
mental plotted points of possible otherness,

ways one may be seen divided
duty-wise. Needful news.

Drink water from your own cistern,
save rain water for washing hair,
keep the spider in the spout,
to catch most matter washed
from the roof over our minds vidroning view

Googlized minds, in Disneyified Meta Cognosis,

we arrived at our destination,
and they have clouds of cotton candy.

- must be all vain, all is vanity, that's fair.
- Ecclesiastes, my old ****-rod-*****-point
pain on my backside,
such as Moses saw of Him whose name is as the Dao,
the name that may be said is not Ha Shem,
the side that may be seen is not His, you see, the hole,
not the whole,
and once that is filtered through, a certainly tangled web,
where in it seems,
Jews, in cultural roles granted, now, bat und bar mitzvah,
no veiled ****** similarities to the Handmaid's Tale.

No weeping over spilt milk,
never cry wolf.
Never speak of the devil, for … what speak we in,
when worshipping and praising and praying is supplicant
pose, supposed to induce holy awareness of mathematical me.

What might be the odds, set
taking all bets,
in spirit and in truth, as held in the wedom we acknowledge,
you and me, we agree, we become maker of this bubbling state,

we boil the cauldron, wear the caul of the first born-
we take the fat from the caul of the liver, and offer the smell,
to the unspeakably named reality we make believers build
in times of plenty, we make beautiful things together,

we call dreams retellings, but the tellings flow from deeper wells.

We are more ant-ish than sheepish,
we are more horse-ish than wolfish, in the wild.
We are more dog-ish than cat-ish, in civilized spaces.

Nurture native natal ground boundary of any wedom,
go beyond,
in quest of all we failed to grasp, the wind we fit to words,
and hold the gathered sheaves , in fists,
this is it,
why one how come to become. We be. Alwise, always willing

to envision further than we think men by right may see,
the tree the fruit was forbidden from,
bade the birds imbibe, and the elephants and monkey's too,

certainly, imagine, the plan got out of hand, it was
mandatory
in the garden walled off speck of life,
pre concepts weyeken called cells.

E= okay, rebalance all you respond with

who says what C equals, at my scale, in a mind,
in or out of the body, I can not say, significantly
different from saying, I can't say,

see, set, mindtimespace, spacetimemind, point. A.
Daily bread, liquidity.
Emelia Ruth Dec 2012
I am obsessed,
obsessive
obsessing
over you.
So much that I think I've become ill.

My mind throbs
from all the memories.
Vague and vivid
and even imageless,
remebering all of them
from when we were five
to just last weekend.
My eyes are red and itchy,
my tears that just won't cease.
My body aches,
my muscles feel twisted and ripped
beneath my skin,
as if you tore through my arms
trying to escape from our embrace.
My chest feels heavy
carrying this burden.
And my breath feels thick
with the old blood of our compassion.

I am sick.
Sick with you
and why everything seems totally fine one moment,
and then I get lost in the lull of my empty bedroom,
with a knife reflecting
your handsome rigid face.
Gorgeous and lushly coloured
West End lights so brightly shine
Reflected in the obsidian road wet with rain
And slick with reckless hope
The painful ***** of tired dreams
Winds down around a bronzed
Soldier, toting his gun, who grimly
Sets his lantern jaw against the
Long dead faces of war and fear

I sit at his feet and watch the cabs
I draw on my cigarette and pick out
Eyes of the people sitting in their seats
They are travelling fast to places
Where I’ll never go and I don’t care
Their lives will play out and we’ll never
Speak or smile together though
Our atoms are siblings in phase

I lift my head to the stars and
Marvel at the time passing many
Years ago when the world was young
And nature was naive enough to
Believe she had got it right
The night lights flicker slowly on
And off and mimic the pinprick
Glows against the raven wing
Canvass above my head

Nothing in this world can shake
My beliefs or so I thought
Until the days when life became
A subtle masquerade and the
Food in the dishes no longer gave
Me the nourishment I craved
Everything I knew was wrong
And right was just a wishful thing

So here I sit, my suit crumpled and
Wet with sweat, the tears and rain
My case is thrown over there and it
Has burst its gut spilling those once
Important papers but now just covered
In vacuous glyphs known to others
But no longer to me
At home that think I am this
They think I am that
They say they know what I will say
When this or that happens
They know me little and
Like all men when grips slacken
Just the few square inches in my brain are
Truly mine and infused with logic
That tumbles central and
Squats on a raffia mat
In a windowless room

Happy in my world and loving
In my deepest thought
Placid in my retrospective views
Motionless against the swell
Of the crowd around me;
Nothing more of me is required of me now
I am free to leave they tell me
And for that I’m
Pleased

I close my eyes and fall to imageless sleep
The cabs keep whizzing by and
The stares are still fixed upon their
Days of lives as they approach
And when they finally come
I will greet them with a simple

“You know me”.
Dallas Phoenix Sep 2016
I'm sick of bringing welcoming baskets to my brain-dead neighbors;
They reek of reoccurring favors and fading candle labor;
I mean...
It's to a point I fell asleep by the wishing well;
And woke up counting sheep frolicking piggies playing kiss and tell;
Debunking trumpets of cachet telekinesis;
I'm a hidden sinning villain with chewable junk as his personal Jesus;
Evade gratuitously from all kinds of communication;
Never wanted the attention, but I caught it's contamination;
And my face melted;
But kept a defunct smile just in case;
I need to worm through the dross and cut myself into the chase;
I'm a motley of misinterpreted mayhem;
A clothing shop for a wandering vagrant's cloudy stray phlegm;
Trying to comfort the uncomforted;
My life is just a Death Row inmate's last words with unwanted conjunctions;
But somehow through misery
I pride myself imageless and infinite;
Reeling in the years to blow that last smoke before the finish;
Onoma Oct 2014
First and Last impression foisted a revelatory sheath that
is the looking glass of all incarnation.
Revelatory sheath Facing both ends of the whited tunnel...
prior to birth when exiting...upon death when entering.
What was, is, will be Faced...prelude to the sound of
silence...that is the mouth of the nameless called by Name.
White pearls that spun their shells, as dilating eyes that
behold self in no-self.
Space fatigued by perfect stillness...self in no-self, suspended
animation...whose mind is allotted infinite motion.
The Original Face...***** features insure paradox...must be
worn and beheld Wholly...lest a chaotic incoherence whorls...
irregardless of the image of self...imageless no-self.
If Pure Consciousness had a Face--divested of its Way through
materiality, to melt by that which it cannot transcend...how
would it appear?


*"Original Face" is a Zen terminology referring to our face before we incarnated.
Spike Harper Sep 2016
It tares.
And shrieks.
As sludge oozes from its maw.
A sickeningly sadistic synchronization.
Of self.
An imageless idea.
Yet present.
Semantics says otherwise.
The minds eye can only see so far.
For those circling about.
Have already claimed the categorization.
Regardless.
A demon can only hide for so so long.
Before it too begins to believe.
And act accordingly.
There are many questions in the little thing called
The consciousness and the state of madness
Which is shared with one and many
And these questions are solved by your present self
And the future and present seem to coupled into enervating instances
These are the premonitions of an old sailor
Who would be better in fiction, than a real Marauder
Such was the cry of the Ancient Mariner
Time only unravels, how much it mentions the need for apotropaic antipathy towards birds and people as such
Slightly touched and cursed by time
If you indulge in a cup of thoughtful tea
And the green color of the intoxication
By the death of a positive soul when, this imageless perception
Becomes beyond your grasp of imagination
Then the cold rain can even seem hot at the right time
With a system of channeling your fighting spirit
Cursing your opponents when they seem weak
I'll never get the revolution I want.

— The End —