Ginger ninjas

(based on suggestions from @tiggyjohnson, @sulphura, @dogpossum)

You can’t catch gingerbread men like a common cold.

You’re like, running for the door. It’s okay, you can go.

Biscuit feet walk through walls and nobody notices,

legs still as scratching posts before motionless

sliding glass. Not entirely unlike a ninja.

Twenty years I’ve been fighting demons.

Nancy Ninja boys come in, six months later

the demons are pissing themselves with fear.

These breaden creatures are so cookie-cutting edge

they go out of date every three hours.

They come from a journey through time and space.

Parallel world; it’s like a gingerbread house.

All those temptations calling: ‘eat me’. The buttons!

Not the gumdrop buttons! I’m a bit confused,

who’s the bad guy here? Bread or demons?

Nothing’s worse than a ninja – they’re masters

of every style of combat. When they get drunk

they remember every burger down to the sauce,

every late night spent eating bread from a bag,

dipping it in anything runnier than bread.

You know what gets me? Hansel and Gretel

run home to tell everyone and turn peaceful communities

into vigilantes. Witches get burned. I don’t know about you

but I’m gonna go trade my cow for some beans.

No one else is seeing the funny here.

What was she gonna do, float a pencil at them?

Perhaps the ninjas need a new courier project,

they could bring the demons to us, drag them

here by their high pale cheekbones.

It could unnumb us to invite them over the threshold.

Twenty years of ginger ninjas line up at our door.

They’re delivered every three hours, we can’t ignore

the glossy pile-up of iced-on eyes, it’s everything there is.

Let them in and fairy tales are real. This hurts so much.

It's real, and sometimes it fucking hurts, but it's sort of all we have.

________________________________________________________

Today’s poem is based on suggestions from three peeps:

• @dogpossum: "drunken, misremembered misadventures"
• @sulphura: "ninjabread men"
• @tiggyjohnson: "jeans=cat scratching pole"

I’m not sure how, but today’s poem evolved into a bit of a mashup of lines from Garden State, Scrubs, Buffy, The Mighty Boosh, Doctor Who, Black Books and Shrek. Here’s the stats of where the bits and pieces fit in:

• 1^st stanza: Line 2 – Garden State, line 5 - Scrubs
• 2^nd stanza: Lines 1-3 - Buffy, lines 4-5 - The Mighty Boosh
• 3^rd stanza: Line 1 - The Mighty Boosh, lines 2-3 - Doctor Who, line 3-4 - Shrek
• 4^th stanza: Line 1-2 - Scrubs, lines 4-5 - Dylan Moran
• 5^th stanza: Lines 1-5 – Buffy
• 6^th stanza: Line 1 – Buffy
• 7^th stanza: Line 2 – Mighty Boosh, line 3-5 - Garden State, line 4 – Buffy

And apparently ninjabread men are really metaphors in disguise. Tasty, tasty metaphors.