"Mouth fills w/taste of copper.
Chinese paper. Foreign money. Old posters.
Gyro on a string, a table.
A coin spins. The faces.
There is an audience to our dream.
Magic shade mask.
Like the hero of a dream, he works for us,
in our behalf.
How close is this to a final cut?
I fall. Sweet blackness.
Strange world that waits & watches.
Ancient dread of non-existence.
If it's no problem, why mention it.
Everything spoken means that,
it's opposite, & everything else.
I'm alive. I'm dying."
page 80 of Wilderness Volume 1 Vintage Books 1989
by James Douglas Morrison
"Why do I drink?
So that I can write poetry.
Sometimes when it's all spun out
and all that is ugly receeds
into a deep sleep
There is an awakening
and all that remains is true.
As the body is ravaged
the spirit grows stronger.
Forgive me Father for I know
what I do.
I want to hear the last Poem
of the last Poet.
page 119 of Wilderness Volume 1 Vintage Books 1989
by James Douglas Morrison
Happy Death-Day, Jim, old friend - I know you're in
ecstatic over Wallace Fowlie using his literary
authority to elevate you from rock star to Poet so
that students of Universities -as I was once before
Fowlie's book Rebal as Poet: Rimbaud and Jim Morrison-
would no longer receive unfair, unjust "F" marks
because the self righteousness and vanity of those who
clogg the lieteray scene with there panic words and
intent from the "publish or perish" ivory towers - w/
no real understanding of the ancient lineage of Poetry
which is not bound or defined by a degree.
Jim, as Wallce once told me and in the realm that
there are no coincidences, "you cannot not be a Poet -
for the way you view life is Poetry." And, this, as no
coincidence for you too -
Best always,
John A. Conte` JR
