Call Me Ishmael

I’ve been traveling for the past three weeks, and I’m taking a week off of Moby-Dick.

I love traveling, but being away from New York always leaves me thinking of my favorite places in the city — not even so much the Met or the Brooklyn Bridge, but the small places that it can be easy to take for granted. Here’s a song I wrote a while back about my favorite food cart in Washington Square Park.

At the Dosa Cart

It’s all unspoken at the dosa cart,
Following league after league of broken artists
Tall amid defeated parties lost to the study of law.

Always awoken at the dosa cart,
Tottering elms conceived by the literati / the aristocracy —
One and the same in the days of dear Henry James!

Told by the workings of the dosa cart —
Deftly maneuvered crepes on such a piss poor griddle, and consistently!,
Better than Edith Wharton, if you ask me.

Eating a dosa from the dosa cart
In a purposefully barren water font smacks of every beauty seen
Since the fountains were choked out at old Versailles!

At the dosa cart,
The token hearts of you and I
Can recreate as birds in self-same sky
Though polluted from years gone by!

(c) and (p) 2008 Patrick Shea
Words and music written by Patrick Shea December 2008
All parts performed, arranged, and recorded by December 2008