And then I'll just go-- if someone
asks me to read "Lucky Life" the title poem I'll do that.
This is called "The Sweetness of Life."
It's about mushrooms.
And there was a book came out many years ago.
The Mushroom and the Cross, I think it was called.
And then Civ 101, and it shows that all religion
came from ingesting mushrooms.
And I had a friend who taught world civilization or history,
and he was an ex-Catholic.
And they're the worst.
And he loved to prove that there was no God.
There was nothing.
And so I told him about-- well, I told him about Ezekiel.
He'd never heard of Ezekiel.
Ha, Catholics don't read the Bible.
And I told them about Ezekiel ingesting
what in the King James Version was called a roll.
I told him it was a mushroom, and he went crazy.
And then when he came across that book,
he just taught about how everything was mushrooms.
So this poem is for my friend, Kevin Riley.
It's called "The Sweetness of Life."
"After the heavy rain we were able to tell
about the mushrooms, which ones made us sick, which ones had
the dry bitterness, which ones caused
stomach pains and dizziness and hallucinations.
It was the beginning of religion again--
on the river-- all the battles, ecstasies,
persecutions taking place beside the hackberries
and the fallen locusts.
I sat there like a lunatic, weeping, raving,
standing on my head, living in three and four,
five places at once.
I sat there letting the wild and domestic combine,
finally accepting the sweetness of life, on my own mushy log,
in the white and spotted moonlight."