Few poems begin with an instruction as rude and as magnificent as "Spit a million brilliant white stars into the sky." Spitting is a small, bodily, slightly disgusting act, and Thomas W. Morris makes it cosmic. That clash sets the tone for "Clean Eyes", which reads like a set of instructions for seeing the world freshly. The speaker issues orders in nearly every line: spit, smile, dance, open, gaze, grow, allow, see. The central idea is that clear vision is not something you wait for. You make it through actions that are a little reckless, a little strange, and finally gentle.
The first stanza is deliberately unsettling. The smile "like a reptile feeding off a thousand crickets" is not a warm picture. It suggests joy as appetite, a cold and hungry delight. Then the speaker has us dancing "with the birds and planes", putting nature and machinery in the same sky. The stanza ends on its most puzzling line: "Do not explore a funfair when you have all the tickets." Judging by the imagery, the advice seems to be that you shouldn't hunt for thrills when you already hold everything you need. Wonder is already in your possession, so you only have to use it.
The second stanza darkens. Sunsets are "pretty but sad", and the darkness "masks / A stunning settlement to why wolves kill at night." "Settlement" is a slippery word. It could mean a resolution or answer, or a place where people live. Either way, the poem hints that night hides something beautiful behind its menace. The wolves read as fears that prowl in the dark, and the fix is to "shine light upon the uncompleted tasks", so that unfinished business loses its power once you look at it. The wolves flee when "your beauty summons a sprite", and the fairy-tale logic is charming. Seeing clearly doesn't fight the fear. It simply makes something brighter appear.
The third stanza turns inward. The speaker tells us to "gaze beyond the flourishing stars you spat out", so we are asked to look past our own creation. Next comes the "third eye in the middle of your mind", a phrase borrowed from spiritual language, and the tears that "are going to sprout". Tears become seeds, and sadness is treated as something that grows. The stanza ends on "Align the winds to a breeze where you can unwind." The wind softens into a breeze, and the near-echo of "wind" and "unwind" loosens the tension of the lines.
The poem's shape reinforces this journey. It has fourteen lines, laid out as three quatrains and a closing couplet, which is the layout of a Shakespearean sonnet. Each quatrain rhymes ABAB: sky/fly with crickets/tickets, then masks/tasks with night/sprite, then out/sprout with mind/unwind. Some of these rhymes feel pulled in for the sound, "sprite" especially. The lines are long, roughly twelve to fifteen syllables, and they don't follow a strict beat. The result is a loose, talky rhythm, closer to a speaker thinking aloud than to a polished chant.
The couplet is where the pattern slips. "Allow your eyes to turn into ancient artifacts / See the sensational space around you in different shapes." A sonnet's ending usually rhymes tightly, but "artifacts" and "shapes" only brush against each other through their closing sounds. Because the couplet withholds the click of a true rhyme, the poem seems to stop mid-breath, which suits its message that seeing is never finished. The image is also striking. Eyes turned into "ancient artifacts" suggests vision that is old, preserved and precious, as if you were looking through the accumulated sight of centuries. The poem's final word is the plain "shapes", after all that spitting and sprouting.
What makes the poem worth reading is that mixture of tones. It sets crude and cosmic images side by side, and its commands begin with swagger and end with surrender. It treats fear, sadness and wonder as parts of the same landscape rather than separate moods. Its title promises "clean" eyes, but the poem gets there messily, through spit, tears and wolves. That honesty gives it a strange charm.