The Shroom Deity

image borrowed from bing

The Shroom Deity

"Timothy Leary's dead.
He's outside looking in,
he'll fly his astral plane,

takes you tripping around the bay,
and brings you back the same day."

--Moody Blues.

In 1954 Aldous Huxley had himself

a mescaline experience, letting peyote buttons

swing open those doors of perception,

and hark the dandelions sang,

blood turned to apple jelly,

a straw dog jumped up and ran out of the room

barking in German, as the amateur drug culture

dawned like coral sun triplets.

In 1960 Timothy Leary traveled to Mexico

into the plexus of the sub-tropics in search

of psilocybin, soon finding those magic mushrooms

drenched in humidity, hiding midst interlocking

fairy rings as he crouched nose-deep in leaf litter

and dying tree roots, chewing the very palatable

caps off thick sticky stipes, watching squads of

earthstars splitting into majestic puffball star-shapes,

surmising that the oyster gods of fungus were guileless 

and gilled with black shoelace Asian beards

as he returned to Harvard to be fired

so that he could freely accept the throne

of Love Guru for the teeming hippie hordes.

Whereas I had suffered with monstrous migraine

cluster headaches forever, beyond recall, retreating

to shuttered dark rooms, crumpling into a limp lobster

pose with pillows over my head, until 2006,

when the United States government funded

a double-blind study for Johns Hopkins University,

looking at the spiritual aspects and effects of psilocybin,

and I was invited to participate.

38 minutes post-ingestion my perceptual accesses

swung wide open while listening to Miles Davis,

as the room filled with a thick rope of rainbows,

pulsating with brilliant colors that flashed perfectly

with the clarity of jazz notes, as the angelic halos

around our prayer candles hissed and popped

like sparklers, as the table tops and furniture

came alive and I could see them breathing,

rising and falling to the beat, as I floated

for a lifetime on blissful bosons until

the Higgs Messiah arrived stirring the calmness

with breezy beckoning with me joining

with the gregarious clusters of particles

that flocked frantically to it, creating

mass again, working our way leisurely 

back into the room.

My headaches are strangers now,

anxiety just a quaint memory,

God chants behind my pancreas,

death is but a transitory portal,

loving spirits dance in my hallways,

and incredible spiritual well being

rises in me daily as my inner sun. 

Glenn Buttkus

July 2012

Posted over on Shawna's site Flipside Records

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