Shake dreams from your hair

My pretty child, my sweet one.
Choose the day and choose the sign of your day
The day's divinity
First thing you see.

A vast radiant beach in a cool jeweled moon
Couples naked race down by its quiet side
And we laugh like soft, mad children
Smug in the woolly cotton brains on infancy.
<...>

Did you know freedom exists in a school book
Did you know madmen are running our prison
within a jail, within a gaol,
within a white free protestant maelstrom

We're perched headlong on the edge of boredom
We're reaching for death on the end of a candle
We're trying for something that's already found us

Wow, I'm sick of doubt
Live in the light of certain South
Cruel bindings
The servants have the power
dog-men & their mean women
pulling poor blankets over our sailors
I'm sick of dour
faces, staring at me from the T.V. tower:
I want roses in my garden bower;
dig?
Royal babies, rubies
must now replace aborted strangers in the mud.
These mutants, blood-meal
from the plant that's plowed
They are waiting to take us into
the severed garden

So you know how pale & wanton thrillful
comes death on a strange hour
unannounced, unplanned for
like a scaring over-friendly guest you've
brought to bed

Death makes angels of us all and gives us wings,
where we had shoulders,
smooth as raven's claws...

No more money, no more fancy dress
This other Kingdom seems by far the best
until its other jaw reveals incest
& loose obedience to a vegetable law

I will not go -
Prefer a Feast of Friends
To the Giant Family

Jim Morrison
from "The American Prayer"
1978