Sunflowers

It’s Lotus-time!

“I walked on the banks of the tincan banana dock and sat down under the huge shade of a Southern Pacific locomotive to look for the sunset over the box house hills and cry….”

—Allen Ginsberg from Sunflower Sutra

EDITOR’S NOTE: WHY KEATS HAD NO PANTS

In peccadillo paisley jeans, one can sense that the next sentence at the typewriter is going to duplicate an Erasure lyric, wave good-bye my heart so blue. Not seeming so coy when it comes to saluting the muses or the tech disco crowd, or the cosmo fast-track show, one sees origami birds flying free out of the ceiling of one’s bedroom, and is forced to confront that wonderful, but scary blip called Reality on a cold winter’s day in California, where the palm trees all sway to the left with the wasabi swash of green smudge that they call the secret ozone layer. In the throes of a post-shampoo hissy fit, I will place the X-mas tree in the corner, letting each bird decorate each colorful branch with a Chesire Cat’s pouty.

Silver shreds call to mind strange ways in which poetry has become a fascination in this strange desert we inhabit, puncto of inordination that’s so salvo and so fresh. Call it a myriad of charms that’s the flight of the skeleton within, banging pots and pans, and tossing won tons with delirious effect. Won tons stuffed with invitations to express yourself in volumes of gilded letters. Spreckle of gobbledygook, like the little stamp of imprimatur on your grandma’s almond cookie. These too are found hanging under the tree like strophes of magic, ready for that slam-dunk effect of the pen, which cries every day by the mystical, leather-bound diary. Diaries with the uptoux scribbles in red and blue reveal lives entangled like octopus pudding, the many lives of everyday poets and Mr. Potato Head screaming for more guut beer. Dream sequences swish like rivers of scintillating soap suds in and out the window, serenading poets of yore. One can see why Keats had no pants. Why Sunflowers make the best perfume. And Allen Ginsberg floated on a Lotus flower only to read this schlock.

Happy holidays, read this mag, and bless-out, old friends!

Cheers,

Carrie Chang, editor