As the Spirit Wanes, the Form Appears

I know a guy named Tom, and everything he says screams, ‘I’m wonderful! I’m wonderful! I’m wonderful! Look at me!’ But I know something he doesn’t, see: there’s a little bluebird in my pocket, and once it whispered to me: ‘as the spirit wanes, the form appears’.

            You can spend your whole life chasing after pipe-dreams, scattering seeds, throwing witticism to the wind, but ultimately you’ll wind down to a hollow note. You need spirit, see; you need persistence. When you give in to fame, fortune, renown, you lose your integrity completely; that seed inside you that grew flesh, that swelled and warmed and became blood-filled and ripe, it’ll wither away.

            They want your voice, your secrets. They only want it because they don’t possess it themselves. In a world growing crazier by the day, inventing new ways of talking to itself, pretending it has any relevance, any place, any position, any future, you’ve got to live wisely – and not on tenterhooks. You’ve gotta take life by the balls and throttle it, take no shit.

            This guy, Tom, he screams because he’s full of air, and if he doesn’t let it out he’ll explode. But that screaming will one day wind down to a sad wheeze – a sad wheeze that he’ll exhale pitifully, with furrowed brow, wondering where all the power went. It went out of his sleeve and down into the drain, day by day, piece by piece, and he never noticed.

            When you’re all noise, when you never care for truth or validity of opinion, what is real becomes blurred: you pronounce on everything, knowing you know nothing. You give because you feel part of the thing, but really you’re just a poor schmuck and the least you deserve is a kick up the arse. What has become of this world? Proud, ignorant people walking around, out of tune with themselves, out of tune with each other, out of tune with the inner logic of life, with the preciousness of life, with the way things ought to be.

            As the spirit wanes, the form appears. The little bluebird whispers this to me every night as it watches over me. I found him within a dead man’s heart, a dead man who pretended the blue bird was dead but knew it to be alive – he got it out of a night, talked to it, kissed it, told it he still knew it was there, and then put it back into that hot space, poured whiskey on it, enveloped it in cigarette smoke until its wings were tarred and burned. But I have him now, and I’ll never live down what he told me: when you give up on something - when you lose heart - shape takes form, and the words are put into your mouth, and you’re as good as dead.