•  
•     The thick, pungent smell of the muck mingled with my sweat and 
•     blood but could not be hidden by the evidence of my toil.
•     The same mud that covered my hands and arms and crept, ever so slowly,
•     up my feet and ankles, calves and knees.
•  
•  
•     In the beginning the mud was a fixation -
•     An obsession somewhat like my fascination with the smell of the grass
•     and the wind, the sense of the sun, the heat and the chill.
•     As it clung to me for the first time, crawling determinedly up my sweaty,
•     sunburned body, it felt almost as a gentle caress - something I had not felt in
•     eternity and certainly would not feel again if a certain higher power had his way.
•  
•  
•     But like I said, as the mud began to cake, ever so slowly,
•     upon my feet and ankles, calves and knees it became itchy and irritating.
•     Thick and peeling but never off.
•     Somewhat like a sneeze that refused to be.
•     Nearly as unbearable as my punishment which would always be.
•  
•  
•     The mud had not always been there.
•     Unlike my paradisiacal prison which would always exist and,
•     to me, seemed to have forever existed, the mud was a foreign creature indeed;
•    A construction from sheer human destruction.
•  
•  
•     What bothered me most, even more than the itch was that the mire,
•     The nasty sludge which covered me thickly,
•     A mask which kept out the pleasantness of the afternoon breeze,
•     The mud was of my creation.
•     I was the foundation, the base, the cause of my own irritation.
•     The whole situation was rather like attempting to put your leg in
•     a pair of pants but failing - over and over again.
•  

Ok, why, you may ask did Beth Goodsell write a poem about mud?

Truthfully, I don’t know why I attempted poetry in the first place. I’m a horrible poet. When I rhyme I sound like a 7-year-old and when I don’t…well, I get sickeningly melodramatic. I suppose I wrote the poem because I have a deeply rooted desire to excel at poetry.  Or maybe, just maybe, I was feeling dirty…hehe. Get it?

My reasoning behind this poem:

The Stranger really bothered me. I did not find the book inventive or really worth my time.  What did interest me were the Myth of Sisyphus and the Sartre reading.  So I wrote began my poetry writing quest with Sisyphus in mind. 

Basically I saw in my mind’s eye poor old Sisyphus walking down the mountain towards the boulder.  He is generally happy, what with the sun shining and all.  But then something really weird happened - I thought, “If he is continuously rolling this boulder up the hill and then letting it roll back down again – won’t the grass be rather trampled?”  This is where I started in on the mud tangent. Mud, muck, mire, filth…I’m absolutely insane. 

            The poem is essentially about Sisyphus’s annoyance with being caked with mud.  He already has to deal with being forced to roll the boulder up the hill for eternity and being caked with mud is screwing up his ability to take pleasure from the little things in life (e.g. the cool breeze).  I suppose this relates to The Stranger because Mersault is alive and has to deal with being human but then he also has to deal with being convicted for acting in a way society views as wrong.  The mud represents the people around Mersault who seek to impose their way of thinking upon him – they cling to Mersault as the mud clings, in my silly little poem, to Sisyphus.