From the recording Everything Matters
Lyrics
Shrimp
A bellicose breeze flaps over the whole damn town, oozing noxious drops of caution, creosote and come and get it, you son of a bitch, come and get it now! And then it stops… and the air coagulates into a parcel of penny ante prawns, spread and saturated on a third rate, fourth used, platter of prefab porcelain.
Who eats seafood in this heat? Maurice does.
Cocktail sauce more red than the first gush of globulin out the right nostril of Chuck Wepner.
A positive, I’m sure … or I’m positive, I’m not sure.
But let’s be accurate, it’s not Maurice after 3:25 central D.S.T. The moniker is Mo.
Mo, and his donkey dilettantes, the ones who show up, scurfy hands out, and auctioneer lips flapping.
“Yo? Mo, what the hey? You, all right?”
“Yeah, Mo, you all right”?
“I just said that”.
“Kiss my ass”.
“No, you kiss my ass”.
“No, you, no you, no, you…” it goes on for as long as the pharmaceuticals allow.
But Mo and his cavalcade of gulf coast crustaceans have come to a succulent stop…
A memory pried loose from a long forgotten ganglion, dangling just out of reach. “Never eat the last shrimp”. That’s what she said, right before the paper flew out the window, or maybe that never happened.
Then a left, right, left, hip fake, Mo launches a sky hook, a la Kareem, the Styrofoam clam shell teetering on the rim, half in, half out; waiting for a “Wham bam, I am Jam” tip in; the excommunicated, Atlantic ocean, exoskeletons existing now in a curbside quagmire of wretched refuse.
“Wretched refuse, now shrimp flavored”.
“You seeing Bobby, later”?
An unfortunate utterance, from an unlikely source, can be, and often is, unsettling and so, Mo pauses, as we shall now………………………….
“I said, you seeing Bobby later?”
With a two drink minimum, two dollar cover, two A.M, calm, Mo adjusts his azure eyes to the sight of Cyrus, a long dormant volcano of Krakatoian consequence.
“What do want Bobby for”?
“A cancer diagnosis and a car appraisal”.
“Bobby’s no doctor”.
“Then he can look at the car”.
Over the shoulder: a possum colored, 82 Horizon, hatch back, with a canker sore grill, discusses attorney client privilege, with a decapitated, quarter gets you thirty, “Cool Hand Luke”, parking meter.
“That’s a nasty car”.
“Let’s see what Bobby says”.
“You want to sell that car to Bobby, then don’t try to sell it to him”.
“What’s that mean”?
“It means that life’s short, unless it’s not”.
“Is that a threat”?
“Nah, it’s a treat. Watch your H’s”.
Two seconds of silence, then a flash of monofilament, and an expert evacuation of an errant spinneret, from the resident vacuum, between bicuspid number two and canine number one, of Mo’s sienna smile. Oral hygiene overrated? Not here, not now.
“You got any more shrimp”?
“Only the one in my pocket”.
“Shirt or pant”?
“Does it matter”?
“Of course, it matters. Everything matters”.