the world a letter

This is just wierd. First, check out this dream I had two nights ago, and I've been meaning to post but haven't had a second:

I dreamt a poetry festival was coming to Highland Park (where I live). We were all watching auditions, deciding who to accept. The Rolling Stones had just finished singing (on a trapeze bar, as if to remind me that it was a dream), my grandfather was unimpressed, "Ah, what's so great about that?" I felt abashed, he was right. I'd wasted $180 ($50 on cds, $50 on lobbying, $80 on ???) lobbying/supporting their application. We walked to another area. There, Lorna Dee Cervantes was a performance-yoga-poet. She'd make subtle yogic motions with her body, repositionings really, from static position to static position, that were very powerful poems. My grandfather was skeptical, but open to learning--she explained in gorgeous song, that

"Shoes shine, baby, shoes shine, shoes shine,
but you gotta shine shoes, shine shoes.

Shoes shine, baby, but you gotta work it,
you gotta shine shoes, shine shoes, shine shoes."

Since I can't sing the tune I still have, I'll just say the intonations meant, more or less, that anything, even shoes, can be transcendent, but you have to be willing to do something as humble and unlikely as to shine shoes--and the way she sang "shine shoes" meant shine like a gemstone, not just polish, which is why I say 'unlikely'. And her voice was lovely with praise, with meaning both ways of this reality of achieved transcendence (i.e. that shoes can shine, and that it takes complete humility and dedication to the humble to get them, or anything, to do so), were beautiful.

Me, and my grandfather, were impressed--faded, actually, out of the dream and into the song being sung. And I've been singing it all day.