knife in hand, new orleans is an ardent oyster shucker seeking not pearls but rather the eager consumption of tart juice & slippery succulence if your psyche is tight big easy will pry you open and suck, swallow your inhibitions without chewing just after slathering hot sauce on the chilled goose-pimples of your disrobed flesh shivering beneath the artificial cold of air conditioned discomfort folk not from here say we nasty wrinkle their nostrils in our presence but keep coming back slipping betwixt the warmth of our nights where brazen shadows couple and dance with abandon how can we ignore the specter of a drunken politician french kissing an underage paramour or the exorcism of an unfrocked priest kneeling in a bathroom stall? —the answer is simply to accept the rawness embedded within each human breast to unselfconsciously embrace the amoral appetites of our predator hearts as each of us searches for ways to satisfy urges civilization may suppress but which nature will not allow any of us to fully deny — or, as one lover said to another: bon appetité —kalamu ya salaam