Beware of the Tickles

Beware of the tickles! Those strange little things
who arrive in your town without boxes and strings.
They don’t come in the mail. They don’t come on the train.
But somehow they get there through sunshine or rain,
through snow, sleet or hail, or whatever comes down
from the sky and is falling all over your town.

Who knows where they came from? They’re found everywhere!
They hide under basket, box, table and chair.
They hide very well. If you look you will find
that the tickle you found has just left you behind
in its lightning fast search for an new place to hide.
To find it again you must search far and wide.

They live in the forests, in deserts and beaches,
in cities, in farms and in high mountain reaches,
in ponds, brooks and dells. About any old place
is where one of these tickles might well show its face.

They might hide in your shoe, or slip into your sock,
or find a small hiding place under your smock
where the arm meets the shoulder, just down a few ribs.
That’s a spot that each tickle delights to call his.

And then, can they sit still? Oh, no, they cannot,
for thousands of tickles will swarm to this spot.
It’s a spot tickles prize, so they squiggle around
to keep others away from the spot they found.
As more tickles try to slip into this space,
a ‘grand tickle tussle’ begins to take place.

Once you’re aware of this ‘tussle’ of sorts
you will find it the most unpleasant of sports,
for the tickles all roll about over your skin
and the noise calls more tickles who what to join in
the ruckus that’s growing down under your arm.
This, you will note, is great cause for alarm!

Some of the tickles who eventually lose
the wrestling match under your arm will then choose
to find a new spot, such as behind your ear.
But beware! You are not yet in the clear
for as more tickles loose, the tickle fights spread!
You aren’t ever safe, even under your bed!

The tickles will wrestle almost anywhere,
and under your bed, why, there’s more tickles there
who are hiding, and waiting, and looking around
to find good spots other tickles haven’t found.

What can anyone do when such dangers abound
and a million or so tickles hover around
all patiently waiting for you to come near
so that they can hop on before you can get clear?

There’s only one man in the world, I am told,
who got rid of his tickles: young Mack Leopold.
He lives by the sea, down the road from Pompey,
in a tickle-free house by a tickle-free bay,
and he works very hard from morning ‘till night
to make sure that tickles remain out of sight.

He catches them quickly in tickle-proof nets
and then puts them in large pickle jars, which he gets
from his neighbors, his aunts, his uncles and cousins,
who all eat pickle sandwiches by the dozens.

(These cousins are farmers, as everyone knows,
who grow every kind of a pickle that grows.
They have to keep tasting to make very sure
that the pickles they grow will turn out clean and pure.)

Young Mack takes the jars and mails them each day
to a place where he knows tickles can’t get away.
It’s a place they call Far-eastern Western McFaad,
a place where delivery of mail is quite bad.

They take months to get there, and once they arrive,
they’re stacked up in boxes in neat rows of five,
and sit ‘til the delivery address is found,
and then only delivered if someone’s around.

You should know that in Far-eastern Western McFaad
the weather has always been worse than quite bad.
The natives don’t like it, and go far away
on extended vacations almost every day.

In F. W. McFaad, those boxes stay stacked.
In F. W. McFaad, those tickles stay packed.
The postman who lives there doesn’t mind much
for it lets him take daily a seven hour lunch.

So, save pickle jars, and fix up your best net.
Be ready the mischievous tickles to get.
They won’t get away! We’ll track them all down
and get rid of the tickles in our part of town.

We’ll put them in jars, and the jars in a pack.
We’ll mail them away where they’ll never come back.
An soon we will find, when we look around,
that there aren’t any tickles left to be found.

Beware of the tickles! Those strange little things
who arrive in your town without boxes or strings.
They don’t come in the mail, they don’t come on the train.
But somehow the get there through sunshine or rain
or snow, sleet or hail, or whatever comes down
from the sky and is falling all over your town.