Mud

I scrape mud from my shoe
with my other shoe, like a proverb
of unknown origin about how
explanation sometimes leads
to greater confusion. 70%
of the body is mud, which harkens back
to the days when we were mere
ferocious tadpoles building gated-
communities in the mud. Even
back then when mud was money
some had more mud than others
though mud was everywhere.
If you leave a footprint in the mud
or better yet a series of footprints
as you walk through the mud,
after you've travelled a certain distance
you could look back and say
someone's following me
especially if you aren't
that bright. I'd take mud over snow
any day since it's more interesting
to make mud angels
than snow angels though shoveling
mud is, admittedly,
tough. Wake up and smell the mud,
says the commercial actor, talking
about his own broken life
without realizing it
before the take is flubbed. The expression
here's mud in your eye, sometimes
used as a toast, is in fact just a way
of saying, Hey, buddy, what's wrong
with you? There's mud
in your fucking eye.

Stool

To put your feet on it
is to submit to a kind of obviousness
that calls into question
whether the stool is our device
or the reverse. It is more pleasing
then to recast the stool
as a countertop for early childhood
or a chair so small
that almost no one you know
can sit on it. The stool I have in mind
is a little three-legged number
winsomely neglected
by some northern-European architect
which somehow made its way
into your home, and by your home,
I mean mine. Naturally,
it is a kind of clean blond hardwood
sufficiently scuffed and chipped
to suggest, without entirely
realizing it, an air
of utility. One trips over it
mostly, and maybe that accounts
for the nicks and gouges,
and maybe this is the stool's
true secret purpose: to serve
as a kind of booby trap
that spurs contemplation
of the world's many visible
but unnoticed and nearly ubiquitous
hazards. The other thing
about stools is that having
more than one of them
is so cumulatively useless
it reminds us (me, anyway)
that even one is a grotesque
surplus. If you turn a stool upside
down you could make
a kind of mini hat rack
out of it. That
is just one suggestion.