A pigeon at the foreign languages faculty goes to seagull classes out to sea. As Flamingoes chip away for their exam in ‘Woodpecker up a Tree’ An exchange English crow gets French sparrow tutorials on the streets of gay Paris.
Greenfinches studying ‘Parrot’ do their best as kingfishers get hooked on ‘Gold-crest’. As model eagle students soar above the rest. Mallard ducks take the plunge and take the ‘lesser swallow-tailed swift’ test.
Pelicans learn how to be robins with a Christmas term trip to a quaint little village As wrens learn how to crane their necks for ‘Ostrich’. Budgerigars try to gobble like turkeys fattened for the fridge. Erasmus vultures steal like magpies on a steel bridge.
As birds of a feather flock together for a degree to migrate, the owl-scholarly hierarchy hawks sit at the top of their perch; and deliberate.
John Di Girolamo was born during the swinging middle ages as the Battle of Hastings raged outside on a cold, miserable Saturday evening just outside 'The Juggler's Arms' in Oxford, Torquay and Exeter at the same time. Born to a family, he spent most of his early years learning how to open umbrellas for a rainy day, and the runnings of horses and sword swallowers and the costs they incurred. Having graduated in 'Circus Management', he took to spinning plates for a living and persuaded his father to buy a restaurant to fund what he believed would be a lucrative career move. However, in the the days leading to The Age of Post Punk', he quit and would embark upon what was to go down in history doodles as a notebook.
Few knew it then but he had already started copying poetry, and often written by other people. As the minutes passed by, and Sardinia loomed, the idea of collages and drawings suddenly hit him as a way of filling up what had become a kind of book with pages and all. One day while storming off in a huff because his mum told him to, he struck upon the idea of putting it all together over a long-playing record (later a CD) and during a commercial break in the digital age, decided a blog would end Cromwell's ill-fated republic.
Sent off by recorded post, it would be by chance that his poems would get to their ultimate destination as, meanwhile, his pigeon who had queued so loyally for so long, sadly died the day before it was sacked.
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A Pretty Kettle of Poetry 