Sept 4th 2020

Sept 4th 2020

Stool Pigeon

   I guess I knew the term stool pigeon from watching Jimmy Cagney or Edward G. Robinson black and whites at the Odeon Cinema or the Splendid (aka, the Bug Hutch), not sure. Anyway, it meant a police informer or person acting as a decoy, a snitch. The term seems forgotten. Funny how certain things are remembered and others forgotten. The hugely popular Seinfeld Show (early '90s), which I'm watching reruns of now, seems to me almost contempory so when I mention it to anyone under 30 and they don't know what I'm talking about, I'm astonished—they've generally heard of The Beatles.
   To return to the Episode5 imagery, not many people that I've asked notice just how many pigeons there are hobbling around with only one foot(two feet and it's cutains for them). One big cause of this injury is from getting snared in nylon netting, I freed at least one bird trapped in this stuff in the garden and stopped using it.
   There's a poem I wrote, here it is, Paths it's called.

Where

where is she off to
so driven

One imagined
her in youth
as she sat
in the asphalt Square
She'd had looks
this woman

but was now drawn
into herself
faded
and alone
And I questioned why
I'd conjured her story
If I'm her keeper

what then of
the one-footed pigeon
that limps
unnoticed
on it's uncharted course
between restless feet
even as that world fades

when I stir in my dream
and the Present flows

here

I don't know how this stands up as poetry but, written a while ago, seeking for symmetry, it reveals a long-running concerned for one-footed pigeons; so many, traumatised, soldiering on. No one thinks much of pigeons, even the best specimens. I say a monument to one-footed pigeons. Return and continue Episode5