I’ll be honest: I can’t quite understand Jim Morrison. I think he was a very contradictory person, and in that regard, I identify with him, because I am too and many times, I really don’t understand myself.
I decided to title this work “Lizard Poet” because of that same enormous contradiction that I find in him, and to honor him as what he always wanted to be recognized: a poet.
However, he was also a rockstar, although I feel like it was a guilty addiction for him. It was he himself who created this alter ego of the Lizard King as his own stage idol impersonation.
So, I think that while he enjoyed and even kind of needed to be seen as a sex symbol, a rock star, a music icon, a desired celebrity, he also hated being all of that for he saw himself mostly and firstly as a poet, and despite having aroused admiration in the music industry, his true ambition was to be recognized as a poet, and to feel the merit of being seen as the obvious intellectual that it takes to write true poetry.
This man created a whole mystical air around himself, and I believe that mysticism was built through his astonishing inner contradiction.
Like all the characters in this collection, I think he was trying to escape from his reality and from his own mind with the use of drugs and alcohol, which, like the other characters, would end up tragically taking his life.
I can say that I greatly enjoy the music of The Doors. I love the lyrics, the music, the voice, the staging. But I also feel, perhaps a victim of Morrison’s mysticism, a deep darkness in his performances… a heavy darkness in many of his lyrics… and all of this also makes me think, or be sure, that no one ever knew the real Jim Morrison.
I think he took with him many demons that he managed to chain in his mind away from the public eye and even private.
The truth is, the guy was a genius. A genius that perhaps he himself never managed to understand.