The Squawk Box

The day begins with a noise that hurts our ears and rattles the clocks,

the morning announcements and news coming over the squawk box.

It brings tears to our eyes and grates on our teeth as if we were chewing rocks

when we hear the feedback squeal coming out of the squawk box.

We would prefer to spend our mornings enduring electric shocks

than to listen to the flat nasal drone coming from the squawk box.

I've stuffed cotton into my ears and find that most sound it fully blocks,

but not the stultifying honk and blather gushing from the squawk box.

If you want to protect your corn from crows in all their swooping flocks,

send them flying in panic by enhancing your scarecrow with a squawk box.

Do you want to banish that unruly crowd that hangs out by the docks?

Just play them some Wagnerian opera over, you guessed it, the squawk box.

They say nothing bothers those who came up through the school of hard knocks.

But even those toughies cringe when they hear the growl from the squawk box.

The knowledge of cheapo electronics and of chaos theory unlocks

the secret of the cacophony that we all hear coming from the squawk box.

With static, distortion and feedback it mocks

the idea of clarity. Yeah, that's the squawk box.

I've heard how an upper-class woman goes to the pawnshop and hocks

her jewelry to buy earplugs that will shut out the howl coming from the squawk box.

If sound were a smell, then rotting, reeking gym socks

would not smell nearly as bad as the stuff from the squawk box.

Now we must pause and ponder the great perplexing paradox

of people trying to communicate through the squawk box.

Bagpipes and banjos and a wheezing old fox

sound ever so much better than the noise from the squawk box.

My uncle went broke because his broker bought the wrong stocks.

That's right, he placed the order over the squawk box.

May the Good Lord in justice inflict an everlasting pox

upon the Spawn of Satan who went and invented the squawk box.

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