Dave Bonta starts with a small domestic joke: a cat caught on the kitchen counter with a bit of onion and lettuce in his mouth, convinced he's a dog, while the dog believes she's human. The tone is light and fond, a household anecdote told with a smile.
Then the poem turns on "us." Humans, it says, are the strangest of all, because we claim we are what we eat yet are rarely present when we eat. We're already thinking about dessert. The comparison to shrimp, bottom-dwelling creatures that tolerate toxins, makes us sound like scavengers getting by on whatever we can swallow.
The ending is the most striking part. Our strongest muscles, the poem says, carry us away from wherever we are, and we watch that place shrink to the size of a shrimp. The speaker seems amused but also quietly wistful. The mood moves from playful to gently melancholy, a reminder of how restlessly we leave our own moments behind.