“Doors”

“Listen, real poetry doesn’t say anything, it just ticks off the possibilities. Opens all doors. You can walk through any one that suits you,” Jim Morrison wrote in a self-interview published in Wilderness: The poems and diaries of a rock ‘n’ roll legend. Throughout his work, Morrison assumed a connection between the realm of the desirable unknowns and the potential of human words to bring us there. “I am the lizard king. I can do anything,” Morrison famously intoned. Our potential to make magic out of the stuff that makes us up is at once empowering and terrifying. Where do our words take us?

 

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“Untitled”

 

–I fear that he’s been

maim’d beyond all

recognition

 

He hears them come &

     Murmur over his corpse.

 

Street pizza.

 

–Jim Morrison

 

/

 

“Untitled”

 

Let’s wander through some serene &

secret place

where reality grinds into our feet

 

& When the reason demons come knocking on our doors

     We will have nothing to do with them.

 

Let them eat dirt!

 

–Me

 

/

 

Words take us places we didn’t think we’d go. They’re slices of us that describe and define us. Still, we struggle to make sense of words and their ability to transform the mundane and characterize the absurd. Often, our words redefine our realities so much so that their limitless potential leaves us with nothing but us. Anything is possible.

–Camille Dourmashkin-Cagol