Red Tin Noodles

The man with needles
had them all in stitches.
His specialty was sewing
funny britches.
Sometimes you’d find
sewn on the cuff
a collar button or ear muff.
Some pants might sport
inverted pockets,
or belt loops
that looked like rockets.
One might find louvres
in the knees,
the better to enjoy the breeze.
A tailor this bizarre,
some said, might have
a loose thread in his head.

No one uses fuses any more.
You cannot find them in a hardware store.
So if you own a house with ancient wiring,
you’d better pray your fuses aren’t expiring.
You’ll need to get your fuse box overhauled,
says every electrician that I’ve called.
They say, "You’ve still got fuses and not switches?"
And then dissolve right on the phone in stitches.
I wish that I could shock away their smirking,
if only my electric was still working.

Some say a man who plays gin rummy
must be bored or else a dummy.
What a waste of time and mind
trying to find three of a kind.
Yes, but there’s the same suit run.
Oh, they smirk, that sounds like fun.
Those that don’t play find it shocking,
sitting, shuffling, all night knocking.
Finally, someone yells out "Gin!"
Then it all begins again.
Real men fix cars, work in yards.
Desperados fall to cards.
Life must be a real train wreck
if one’s heart lies in the deck.
Players, though, say that’s not true,
citing reasons, fifty-two.
Kings and Queens sit at their table.
Top that, Jack, if you are able.

They found him under Milk Duds,
dead in a movie seat.
The melted chocolate caramel
was all stuck to his feet.
His death was quite a mystery,
but there were several hints.
His eyes were stuck with Jujubes,
mouth filled with Junior Mints.
"Aha! I’ve found the cause of death,"
yelled out a local copper,
pulled from the throat, big as a boat,
breathtakingly, a Whopper.

There was a walrus
used to hang with whales.
His bonding efforts
all were epic fails.
He had no blubber
nor blow hole.
He didn’t have
a whaling soul.
His tusks, they said,
were too damned long.
He couldn’t sing
the whaling song.
His body couldn’t glide
throughout the water.
They shunned him
and he said, Okay,
go on about
your humpback way.
I’ll miss your krill,
but I won’t miss
your slaughter.

Silent summer white lines in the sky
always made me think that soon we’d die;
more so coinciding with the noontime air raid test,
neck craning to spot the fatal mushroom cloud out west.
Hunkered under desks in red brick schools:
looking back it seems that we were fools.
No one even talks of nukes or world war any more.
Now it’s just unending conflict as the news keeps score.

The true man needs
an armored vessel,
heavy woolen gloves
and many pelts;
guns and knives,
blunt tools and bullets,
held in place by holsters
clipped on belts.
I admit to only one such need,
racing storm-soaked streets
at breakneck speed.
If you look outside
and see it’s raining,
know I’m on the road,
out hydroplaning.

Belle, my beauty, out of time,
magnificent, eternal,
stop this hand from writing
these strange entries in your journal.
Make the flowers grow somewhere
just out of sight of man.
Make the aged father leak
so weakly in a pan.
Shine the moon upon the sun,
reverse despotic oceans.
Make us get a healthy tan.
Provide the proper lotions.
And on your last sweet smell of breath,
blow smoke to heal the nation.
Create for us better roads
and faster transportation.

Better to mistake the facts
than pay the deadly ratter’s tax.
I always felt the better man
when I could keep it in the can.
Big mouths sink ships.
The Fifth is pips.
End to end
your biggest test will be:
can you co-exist this silently.
No machines nor music
will you hear.
Is sound so dear?
Next life you will only
talk in tales, thought bubbles
if everything else fails.

It’s no good cooking meat now,
when the universe is fasting.
Surrounded by a tripwire,
either way there’s blasting.
Some folks fear the cowboys’ pride
enhancing man’s undoing.
The trees that whisper sweet consent
betray explosion brewing.

All the world’s a speeding dot on someone’s radar gun.
We’re the moving pieces of the television son.
Dejection chords obtain unholy vim in trumpet layers.
Competing shirt and shoe ads vie intensively for players.
Chemicals and bullets have weighed down the paper ship.
Please go to your local drugstore for a scripted tip.
General Hysteria has wed Major Depression.
Their poison logo tears have now translated this recession.
Revenge tattoos have patented the talon.
Hurtful death’s now packaged by the gallon.

Put big money down upon the favorite,
only givin’ two.
Late game bad calls turned it to a close one,
as they often do.
Down a point, they had to foul our scorer,
sent him to the stripe.
Three ticks left, he calmly swished the first shot,
then he took the pipe.
I was praying, screaming for a tap-in,
but it was too late.
Once again my boys had left me hangin’.
Watched ’em celebrate.

Bloody Mary, money maker,
queen of under cutters:
pepper my tomato heart,
until its beat flutters.

The morning sun was up but looked away.
A brace of turkeys scratched up on the roof.
They turned assaultive post Thanksgiving day.
John Zorn was tooting some radio goof.
Father left the food shelter with blue toes.
I’ll never buy a frozen skink again.
The party could have ended there and who knows.
We might have saved a lot of bathtub gin.
The waiting line was frayed and beat and leaning.
In corners fractured poets took their licks,
as though in this oblique time words had meaning,
as if each grave outsider needed kicks.

NOH MEANS NOH
NOH WAY OUT
IN THE NOH
DOCTOR NOH
NOH WAY, JOSE
NOH HITTER
NOH EXIT
I DON’T NOH
NOH WAR
NOH IT ALL
NOH QUESTIONS ASKED
A THOUSAND TIMES NOH

Animals have been getting into our downstairs kitchen for years.
It’s underground, so they have rights. I once found a squirrels’ nest
under a bookcase where they were using paperback pages for bedsheets.
But, over the years, I’ve fortified. I found breaks where they were coming in,
covered them with wood, plastic, even metal…they chewed through.
Then I found glass. Impenetrable. I drank wine frantically for a year,
amassing enough bottles to erect the Burrow-in wall, and with a swagger
contemplated embellishing with broken glass (I love the smell of squirrel
blood in the morning..). And I thought they were stopped. They were not.
Mice squeezed through. But made no purchase.
This fall I saw what looked like a flash of chipmunk after tracking down some noise.
Unused catnip was the target. I defoodified the kitchen area (we have no
running water there, so it’s a frozen wasteland) and sat back waiting.
They attacked the waste basket until it was lidded. Alas, their last forays
were dedicated to nibbling at a yellow soap bar,after knocking it into the unused sink. Each night a few more gnaw and scratch marks would amass. It was almost cute.
But last night they must have gathered a road crew.
N said she heard some crashing downstairs and in the morning, the soap bar was gone.
I fear a league of chipmunks has come to pass.

It’s too cold in the winter
but too hot in summer’s sun.
The forest’s turned to tinder
and the ocean’s almost done.
There’s genocide on foreign sands
and planes fall from the sky.
Somewhere a general claps his hands
and drones make people die.
I’m quite low on the ladder
but I’m not the bottom rung.
Some say that life gets sadder.
I reply, "Just bite your tongue."
The banks are leeching money
from the poor and dispossessed.
The prisons fill, no need to kill,
wear hoods and be our guest.
The polar ice caps melt away
and flood tides surely loom.
But politicians scoff and say
that talk’s just gloom and doom.
I’m quite low on the ladder
but I’m not the bottom rung.
Some say life will get madder.
I reply, "Just bite your tongue."