"Horse Latitudes" is the fifth song from The Doors second album, Strange Days. The song is a spoken word piece by Jim Morrison with the band providing frightening noises as a backdrop. Morrison speaks the lyrics, telling of a ship at sea forced to jettison the onboard horses to lighten its load. The words are taken from one of the first poems Jim Morrison wrote, inspired by a book cover he saw at a local bookstore as a child. Keyboardist Ray Manzarek mentions in his book Light My Fire he never believed Morrison wrote "Horse Latitudes" at such a young age, claiming the words were "too mature".