For JDM Paris July 3rd 2011

[TheWallsScreamedPoetry]

If any of you have a bit of your own/or a favourite bit of someone else's poetry you want to leave here to commemorate 40 Years since Jim Morrison's passing....feel free to add it to this thread.

I will start the ball rolling with a poem I have been leaving on the fence at Jim's grave on July 3rd for about 6 or 7 years now.

Written by the legendary Doors fan Michael White aka 'Moses Jones', it is the best bit of fan poetry I've ever seen.
He wrote it 10 years ago for the July 3rd 2001 issue of my Scorpywag Doors fanzine and I began leaving it at Jim's grave a couple of years later as well as leaving copies in La Ren bar.

It is a profound piece of prose that struck a chord with me as soon as I read it and as it was in tune with my own ideas about what The Doors should be about 40 years later I present it here as the thread opener.

4 JDM.

Mad America
hurt him into poetry
Mad America
would not get him
Portrait of the artist
as a young detainee



at the time of it's capture
no one knew he would be
the father of a great nation

getting out of town
free to run in a new wood

checks no cash
plastic people
what I have to show you
cannot be bought sold
traded or exchanged

'I'm lonely' he declared
in public often
to capacity facilities

and they attempted to
capture him again

far from home
one final attempt
he made a final entry

on it's cover he wrote
Paris Journal

Written by Michael White for the July 3rd Edition of TheDoors4Scorpywag Doors Online Fanzine 2001

[TheWallsScreamedPoetry]

checks no cash
plastic people
what I have to show you
cannot be bought sold
traded or exchanged

It's funny that we actually have an example of the price Jim put on what he gave to his audience.
It came on the Isle Of Wight in 1970 when he was asked what he thought about fans trading in bootleg Doors lyric books.
He said that he was fine with it as long as they got the spelling right.
When pressed further that he did not mind fans making money out of his words he replied.... "No, what harm can it do."

Ray Manzarek, Jim's supposed friend, has claimed to speak for Jim Morrison many times in this last ten years on the subject of The Doors and comercialisation. He has claimed repeatedly that Morrison would embrace this new age of Aquarius as he described the greed driven culture of The Doors 21st Century.
Jim Morrison does not need Ray Manzarek to put his words into the mouth of a dead Jim Morrison as Jim Morrison spoke eloquently enough for himself when he was alive on the subject.
His IOW response says a lot about a man who was not by any means a saint and had a ton of disturbing habits that deserve nothing in the way of respect. But as an artist he knew only one way and made that clear.
Of course the last ten years tell us a lot about those he made the journey with back there between 1965 and 1971.
History will be the final judge of Jim Morrison.
Whether it will be to forget him completely in the decades to come or whether he will be remembered as a Poet or a pretentious fool.
If Ray Manzarek could put aside his greed for a while Jim may well make the Poet. Time will be the final arbiter of that.