Tripping on Mushrooms with My Friend in New Haven, Connecticut, May 2022

I don't know who told you 
shrooms were the cure for heartbreak
but you sure had a lot, enough
for every sad PhD student on the block,
including me, a fleeting parasite,

here to eat your toast and avocados
and your fungi, of course, 
which I cut up and swallow with water
before we go upstairs and drape 
your room with all the color and fuzz

that exists in your ugly little house, 
which is not much, but it will have to do, 
I suppose, because we are quickly drifting
away on your bed like lovers (platonic, please),
falling into streams trickling through warm gravel, 

feeding rivers churning up lost trinkets
and fish from the depths, surrounding me,
the prince of junk, the smell reeking of mud 
and algae before giving way to the taste
of salt, overpowering as I am flushed 

into the sea; I hold onto my wrist like a branch,
measuring my pulse as if I could stay afloat
in the ocean now separating us, booming with the voices
of Ella and Louis, who have created a multiverse
within me, the same worlds colliding everywhere

in everyone, beauty and pain and light
inaccessible to me -- but alas, all destroyed
by Taylor Swift, whom I do not like, 
I would much prefer Bach, please,
seriously, please, let me put on Bach

who is, ah yes, representative of everything
that is good and beautiful, like bison
and sunrises over the prairie and ten-lane
highways and even when it is all dust
there will still be beauty and Bach

in the shining gas balls of space
as I zoom into the void as a scattered 
mass of particles ingested and pooped
out and dug up for eons; when all is over
the gulf between you and me is not closed

but it is very nice thinking and walking
and eating yogurt outside in the afternoon sun.