Bitches Brew
August 2007

Love Poems For The Wicked
By Brian Morrisy
Zeitgeist Press (www.zeitgeist-press.com)
2007,  19 pages, $5.95

Who says underground poets can’t be the prototypical, sensitive poet lover?  Certainly not Brian Morrisey or his rabid fans (and yes, many of them of the female persuasion.) But to his credit, Morrisey is a romantic on many levels.  With poem titles like the “The Last Cowboy”, “Café Babar”, “Sylvia” and “Another Poem About Andy Warhol” it’s easy to see the aesthetic of the outlaw and the pioneer are not far from this poet’s heart.

Yet neither is it for the faint of heart:

                   “…I am climbing up the walls
                   of resistance
                   to the eyes in the blank face
                   of insecurity
                   looking out a window
                   to an apocalypse
                   closer than the burning
                   more furious
                   than the heat of laughter
                   in the essence
                   of letting go
                   one hand
                   after another
                   fingers pointing
                   to the sky
                   reaching for something
                   anything
                   before losing grip
                   on the afterthought
                   of a gun for hire.”

               -      From “About Face”

Morrisey is unique in that he tips his hat to the old school nobility (and truly what would one expect from an author who publishes a magazine whose name is simply “Poesy”) within the context of our doomed Babylon:

                             “There are people who live
                             in the 3 hour radar of stolen happiness
                             between the weeknight hours of
                             nine and twelve…”

               -      From “Karaoke Nights”

Further damning Morrisey to that circle of hell where he’ll find old friends like Micheline, Lerner, William Carlos Williams, the French Surrealists, Ducasse (yes, the author of a collection entitled “Poesies”) Mary Shelley and Wordsworth is the addressing of the poetic process in a kind of flip meditation called “The Kind of Poem That Almost Rhymes”:

                             “I live in the heart of weird now
                             and am playing dead
                             I turned 30 and found
                             a belly down there
                             I talk about the physical properties
                             of glass
                             all day long
                             I take longer in the bathroom
                             and forget to flush
                             and somehow its okay
                             that hours admit nothing
                             to you  my friends
                             lost in a bad poem.

Morrisey cites Frost and Sandburg as solid foundations, and this shows in his quiet, plainspoken realism, but the overall effect of this collection also smacks of one Whitman’s well studied progeny…a hopeless romantic and imaginer who doesn’t trip outside himself since his perch on the edge of civilization and history offers one hell of a ride in and of itself…and there is quite a poem to be told from that place.

-Paul Corman-Roberts