Hey Daddy-ohs!

I once went through a Beat Generation/Beatnik stage. Sometime after my 'I wanna be a grunge rockstar' stage and about the time I went through my 'I like dying my hair navy blue or, alternatively, English racing green' stage.

Anyway, if you saw me now ... nudging 40s Australian housewife, wearing clogs and jeans, making school lunches, unpacking the dishwasher etc ... oh occasionally, I may find myself leaning nonchalantly against the grimy brickwalls of smoky New York jazz clubs, smoking a Gitane, snapping my fingers in slow syncopation to the funky street jives ... but generally, I'm just an Australian suburban housewife.

Again anyway, during my heady Beat Generation days, I used smoke a lot of cigarettes, drink coffee, wear black pants, French-inspired, navy and white striped, long-sleeved shirts and modish black sunnies, cart around my copy of  'On the Road' (which I think my brother stole, but if you're a Beatnik you don't care), and rather heavy volume of Allen Ginsberg poems.

I did try to read William Burrough's 'Naked Lunch' but it was too disjointed. I just got confused, reality sunk in, and I threw it in the bin.

Despite, what reads like a forgettable attempt at living the life of a bohemian hedonist, I last night remembered one of my favourite Ginsberg poems ... Sunflower Sutra.

I'm gonna share a bit of that with you ... and don't think of contacting any copyright lawyers because, like a true beatnik, I ain't got the cash!

Sunflower Sutra
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 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

... (I'll skip a lot and cut to the chase) ...

You were 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.

Berkley, 1955

(That may lose me some blog followers!)