Keys

I have two sets of keys. One is for the car, and one is for the month of August. August is where I store important things like binoculars, or goats.

Sleep is a key to a world of dreams. It is a place of resurrection, a place where things are transformed into other things and things themselves are elegies of what they can never be.

Dreams float in my skull like birds of the Antarctic, albatross and penguins. The penguins do what the penguins do and the albatross glides through my mind like the guitar of Peter Green, a thing of grace and beauty.

I find minerals in Immanuel Kant. Some of them are red, like distress flares, or the morality of animals. Others shimmer like the punctuation of death.

It is beyond a doubt that all our knowledge begins with experience.

And ends with architecture.

For instance, the Palace of Westminster, or the airplane sitting at the end of this sentence, its propellers spinning, the ailerons going up and down.

Why? Because it suggests a lofty idea of the plan of creation, and appears to me the most seductive, given a choice between a tuna sandwich and Dead Sea mud.

The minerals in Dead Sea mud, it is said, ease rheumatic pains, and provide tranquility. The tuna fish sandwich is an arbitrary thing like hair, and has meanings that echo with high school gymnasiums, and the enamel of enticing choices, decisions that unfurl into unmitigated profligacy.  

The mud in Ève Angeli’s hair throughout her appearance on Fort Boyard is another factor and should be entered into the poem as the kind of detail that creates ripples of investigation. Who is Ève Angeli? What is Fort Boyard? What is the true nature of mud and what can it tell us about plot and narrative?

Ève Angeli is a French pop singer. Fort Boyard is a French game show in which the contestants must win a key or a clue by successfully completing an ordeal, mud-wrestling an Amazonian woman or answering a riddle while snakes and spiders are poured on their heads. At the end of the show a gate is lifted and the contestants race into the courtyard occupied by three tigers. If the answer to a riddle is provided with one correct word, golden coins rain down. The winnings are given to a charity.

The true nature of mud is friendless as death in a universe of broken promises. This precipitates hell, which is another version of heaven, only upside-down. The contestants in Fort Boyard are eaten by tigers before they can reach the gold. This is both true and not true. It is true in the sense that it could be true but it is not true in the sense that mud is a kind of energy in which the mind finds reflections of itself in puddles and such, and is therefore gold. The mind comes raining down in the form of words and creates a metaphor that can only be mud.

Monique Angeon takes care of the tigers on Fort Boyard. She is from Martinique, and is no stranger to mud. She clears the tigers from the courtyard before the contestants arrive. She is a beautiful woman. The tigers are also beautiful. Their beauty is the beauty of the forest and is similar to mud. Their stripes are black because when the universe was created God’s tongs burned their fur. When God was finished with the tigers, he made lambs, according to Mr. William Blake, who writes to us from Hercules Road, London, England.

Mud likes to hang out in poetry because words like it. The word mud likes the other words and together they create a muddle. A deepening turbidity.

Stirred up sediment. Which is tantamount to stirred up sentiment.

If stirred up sediment is left alone the sediment will settle to the bottom and a clear pool of water will appear. It is the same with feelings, but different. When feelings settle at the bottom of the paragraph the rest of the words fall asleep. Dream arise. And this is a cause of igloos.