An Enigma wrapped in a Ball of String

Ancient, late twentieth century free-verse recently recovered and currently perused anew...

Out of the ashes of a past NOLA peregrination, Pablo Phoenix has re-foozled me a riddle previously puzzled over during a perfusion of percolative profundity.

Plucked from the header plate of the men's pisser in Pat O'Briens of Bourbon Street fame...or notoriety.

A prescient prognosticator's play on palabras, portending or perhaps pretending pernicious pastimes, the purposeful prose lay prepatently pickled amidst memories made imbibing pleasingly palatable pitchers of mint juleps, Pabst and Pimm's cups.

A simple phrase, the thing perpetrates a positively pugnacious polysemous piquancy posing as a ploddingly prosaic proverb, and in the doing, perpetuates a potboiler, impenetrable in its opacity for a polyglot of pretentious schleps purloining time through the past and present generational epochs.

Pray thee, puzzlemeisters, peek at the perplexing platitude and espouse or expound upon an explicative interpretation for this pusillanimous plurality of imperceptive plebeians....

It be: 'HO-HO-CAN: BETTER THAN A PIPE FULL OF CRACK.'

A penny for thy thoughts...