For your reference:
| Collection | of | critters |
|---|---|---|
| Company | of | parrots |
| Crash | of | rhinoceroses |
| Culture | of | bacteria |
| Dropping | of | pigeons |
| Implausibility | of | gnus |
| Intrigue | of | kittens |
| Murder | of | crows |
| Parliament | of | owls |
| Pride | of | lions |
| School | of | fish |
| Storytelling | of | ravens |
'Send me to a new school!' wailed the daughter trout;
'Not a chance!' said her pa, 'Can't simply saunter out
We've been here too long; our family records indicate
Every link in our lineage swam with this syndicate.'
'What school, blessed parent, are you talking about?'
'Why, the throng we occupy day in and day out!'
Amused viewer, you know what the littler fish meant,
Alluding as she was to her academic establishment.
The collective noun, in our race a stock curse,
Is amongst our fellow evolvers only worse.
Yet dare you blame Earth's lovesome creatures
For their short supply of English teachers?
A lone specimen of beast is shrewd and winning;
Cast him with his peers and his sanity's a-spinning.
You don't concur? You remonstrate?
Allow me then to d_ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _
Take crows. You often catch one flying
Between branch and antenna trying
To avert his pals, for nothing's absurder
Than knowing it takes two to murder.
Airplanes give me bad food and a dry nose
Yet that’s not why I shan't fly with rhinos,
For one per flight is already rash --
Haul more up and you've got me a crash.
Now how would you react, sir, if I state
You lack culture in private?
Yet such sociological delirium
Is the fate of the bacterium.
(a) Since three's a crowd and two company,
Pair up your parrots, but don't clump any.
(b) Dissolve a parliament only if you're prepared
To have an owl-pecked epidermis repaired.
(c) Never hurt a lion's pride;
A few have, trying, died.
Haven't your doubts on the subject diminished?
Then don't leave yet, our business is unfinished.
You would presume it an elementary tact
To keep society out one's alimentary tract,
But pigeons of the same feather
Create a giant dropping together.
Mischief, though, is not their intent;
No, sir, that the lab mice invent.
Invention, ah, it fetches to mind the other crow,
The darker-plumed child of E. Allan Poe:
The heart of the raven must be brimming with myth
For it's storytelling time always when he's with kith.
Yarns of the greatest intrigue would he tell,
Albeit on kittens does he hardly dwell.
[When, however, he slideth into truth-saying mode,
He walketh the righteous, unsensationalist road;
He walketh the righteous, unsensationalist road;
An impossibility is banned off raven news.
(An implausibility is a band of ravin' gnus.)]
These coincidences, sir, cannot be random,
Hence quod erat demonstrandum.
A passenger on the Ark who had had his way
Resents it hard when he becomes a they.
