Rast Of The Chicken Balls

Last of the chicken balls. Last of the Chinese Buffet of life. Snow peas drowned. Fried rice dried in salty stains of soy sauce sour and clumps of scrambled egg. General Tao's chicken retreated, bedraggled to plum sauce defeat. "Rast of Chicken ball. Ya wan armon' cookie?" Waiter spoken in face saved Cantonese. But where the customer? No music. Deadly silent, bright red, plastic kitch of Chinese aesthetic. Lantern lamps of crooked papers. Vinyl paintings of Shanghai wall. Where the customer? Only the lonely. Alone the fat man sits. Bald head. A depression as sunken as Chinese spoon. Take out and take away the substitute of his happiness gone. The slurping sound remains. Egg roll lips to wonton soup. Stains of red sauce on white, cheap, undersized shirt, sleeves cut short on winter day. He the lonely, drinks beer from a bottle on lowly wage.

Now the students. Roistering, roiling, rolling down stairs in gleeful insouciance of inchoate minds. Half-drunk. Friday time hunger. Typically boisterous with callow tongues. "Rast of chicken ball. You wan' armand cookie." A laughed response, disappointed college anger. Racist jibe left behind. Aren't we all stereotyped. Saddened and ridiculed, periled and biased along the Chinese Buffet of life. Only the lonely as General Tao sips last from a warm Canadian beer.