Licking The Toad Ii Poem by Stan Petrovich

'Doctor: 'Are the tablets beginning to work now? ''
Miss Alma: 'Yes, I'm beginning to feel like a waterlily on a Chinese lagoon.''
-from Summer and Smoke by Tennessee Williams
The Aztec people had a closely related god of sacred psychoactive plants. Xochipilli, Prince of Flowers, was the divine patron of 'the flowery dream' as the Aztecs called the ritual hallucinatory trance.

See them there:
young naked hippies gamboling in the hot reeds
along the Clorado River
in southern Arizona
looking for toads
chasing the hopping delicate toads
whose only defense
is what makes them prized
their poison
their recreational high
Slough them off!
Dry the skins
let them renew their
poison
Paracelsus' dosage
and go live freely
among the black Mojave rattlers
a snake so insidious
that its venom can instantly kill
even the most attenuated herpetologist
poking about with leg-guards
keen awareness
of its terrible behavior
its snin replacement
its striking distance