The Penelope Squad

“The Penelope Squad” A line of bluebirds tittering on a line swaying on the winds like comedian pageboys having a good time poop in the peg bucket words wooden and sharp fly off with frosty notes dirt and sherry stains imprinted on Penelope’s clean sheets a bunch of girl’s blouses touching up waiving skirts The Kingfisher ruffles his comic’s feathers sits like a swollen faced clown behind his ruffled collar of blue big beaked and all facade feathers changing colours he laughs at the butcher birds overtaking the comedy of errors in his ever blooming backyard Mr Carnivorous frowns, oh look, there’s the cat panther pink scratchy tongue whiskers on the rebound name’s Poirot pulling burrs out of it’s soft footed paw doesn’t have a clue there’s a new kid in town The Bush Turkey struts her stuff The Gobbler greedy for love has her story marked the baby chick, named Odyssey, grounded, watches on The Black Dog circles the yard watches over them all their silent sentry and barks it’s black bark The unfaithful slaves weave their days written all numbered with nodding heads and mute chicanery There sits Penelope wingless on a perfectly manicured green lawn wine glass in hand half full with the white shoe brigade and a big shiny black ball Jack High! Kingfisher You Pims and a great flapping of wings Frosty doesn’t like Blue Plath wanders in and suggests a bath He’s going all Hemingway sits Mr Groucho blushing herbaciously periwinkle he's gone all blue sitting now in the nude (LadyLabyrinth/2019) https://youtu.be/cTAycSBW08s Felt Mountain/Goldfrapp birdsong on the first track of this fine album... just for those special moments when reminiscing over this poem ;) https://youtu.be/kNodiuIjoyU "Panic in Babylon - Aufheben"/BJM 1. “The origin of her name is believed by Robert S. P. Beekes to be Pre-Greek and related to penelops or penelops, glossed by Hesychius as "some kind of bird" (today arbitrarily identified with the Eurasian wigeon, to which Linnaeus gave the binomial Anas penelope), where -elops is a common Pre-Greek suffix for predatory animals;however, the semantic relation between the proper name and the gloss is not clear. In folk etymology, Penelope is usually understood to combine the Greek word pene, "weft", and ops, "face", which is considered the most appropriate for a cunning weaver whose motivation is hard to decipher.” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Penelope 2. “Jack High: when the nearest part of a bowl is in line with and at the same distance from the mat line as the nearest part of the jack.” 3. Kingfisher https://www.australiangeographic.com.au/topics/wildlife/2016/11/australias-fabulous-kingfishers/ Kookaburra https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kookaburra