JOHN ROCHE/ Amazing Stories of Literary Rejection, volume 1.

Journal run by hip twenty-somethings
(or so I construe)
rejects poems from ROAD GHOSTS,
including one about freaking out watching
some dude I barely know shooting up
coke and LSD combo
in men's room of Rte. 66 Esso station.

Editors say, there's a question about the reality of someone "shooting up/ coke and LSD combo" in an "Esso station". nobody's heard of LSD being shot up...

So I respond, Happy to look for something else. But if someone on your editorial staff thinks the above trivia impugns the integrity of the book, then fuck 'em.

Of course, the editorial board misses the point, as the poem is a tale told by a
17-year-old tripping fool being told something (maybe) in 40-year recollection
put down on paper, everything a priori indeterminate, except the fear, the black-out hole
in the universe, the blood-splattered needle, and the fact that, miracle of miracles, the
junkie came back to see if I was alive, just like William S. Fucking Burroughs'
immaculate conception Christmas card
and I apparently (at least all else predicated on) survived-
If not I'm living a pretty good facsimile of the previous earth dimension
(though how would I know?), and anyway, that was an analog world
so I'm no longer there, or there's no there there, as Rumsfeld might say
and at least the beer's better now than the Coors we drank back then
and the wine, too, better than Ripple and Boone's Farm
and the coffee a hell of a better than Denny's watery brew
though I miss that old Mexican dirt weed
not hydroponicked or super-sized or genetically modified
just plain ol' weed you could smoke all day and not get lazy.

Then I get to thinking, ah, a simple Google search! To find out what "nobody's heard of":

During the psychedelic era, Dr. Hofmann struck up friendships with such outsize
personalities as Timothy Leary, Allen Ginsberg and Aldous Huxley, who, nearing death
in 1963, asked his wife for an injection of LSD to help him through the final painful throes
of throat cancer.
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/30/world/europe/30hofmann.html

Mumbai Shooters were on coke and LSD:
"We found injections containing traces of cocaine and LSD left behind by terrorists and later found drugs in their blood," said one official.
http://forum.prisonplanet.com/index.php?topic=73366.0

Intravenously Injecting LSD:
http://www.shroomery.org/forums/showflat.php/Number/6005985

And there are many more such evidences on the Worldwide Web.

Postscript: So I send this poem to guy I know on the staff (red-mustachioed Hotspur;
actually a most promising poet-scholar) who tells me a) they aren't all that hip, and b) the lead editor is actually a 50-something poet. So I GOOGLE editor. And there, emblazoned on his blogspot, in bold letters, is the motto, "Poets are liars. None of these poems represent actual people or events accurately. Any truths you find are inside of you."