The speaker of "Advice" delivers a lesson in open-mindedness and, in the same breath, drags a chair out from under the listener. Then, with a straight face, he complains: "i dont like / your methods." The joke is that the speaker's own method, shoving someone to the floor to prove a point, is exactly what he claims to reject. The title adds to the irony, because what follows is less advice than an ambush. The poem asks how often we demand flexibility from others in a rigid, bullying way, and what people do with that kind of "teaching" afterwards.
The form keeps the tone deadpan. There is no punctuation and no capital letter, even for "i," and "dont" has lost its apostrophe. Everything is told in a flat, offhand voice, like someone recounting a small incident without noticing that he is the villain of it. The lines are tiny, often two or three words, and the line breaks do real work. "having pulled / his chair from / under him" literally pulls the phrase apart, so that "from" is left dangling before "under him" arrives. The word "said" sits alone on its own line, so the reader gets a beat of suspense before the absurd complaint. The words "and" and "but" are also stranded on their own lines. They work like hinges, little pauses where the poem turns, first from lecture to violence, later from embarrassment to ease.
The wording is as slippery as the staging. "There is no / only way" is an awkward phrase, and spoken aloud it nearly trips over itself, as if it were already losing its footing. The pronoun "him" ends the opening line ("I told him") and returns at the end of the first stanza's seventh line ("under him"). The man who is spoken to is the same man who is knocked down. "Way" and "methods" are also close cousins, so the speaker condemns in the other person the very thing he has just done himself. There is no rhyme anywhere. The poem has no use for neat closure, and its jokes land through rhythm and placement.
The second stanza leaps forward in time and into fable: "he had half / a soapbox / glued to each foot." A soapbox is the traditional stand for someone delivering opinions to a crowd, a symbol of preaching and certainty. Here it is broken in half and stuck to his shoes, which is both funny and sad. One reading is that the man has absorbed the lesson badly. Told he has no "only way," he has not given up his convictions but fractured them into halves and carried them everywhere. Another is that being bullied has made him literally stand taller on his own opinions. Either way, "glued" suggests something that cannot easily be removed. The poem never says who did the gluing, and that silence makes the image more uncomfortable.
The last stanza is the quietest and the sharpest. "He felt foolish / about his / awkward steps / but / was otherwise / comfortable." The word "but" makes the poem's biggest turn. Embarrassment is acknowledged and then waved away, and the ending is deliberately flat. The word "comfortable" also echoes the chair that was pulled away in the first stanza, so comfort is taken from him and then rebuilt in a clumsier form. People adapt to their own awkwardness remarkably well. We would rather wobble along on our half-soapboxes than question the shoes themselves.
The poem is significant for how much it packs into so little. In about two dozen short lines it manages a satire of hypocritical teaching, a surreal image, and a gently unsettling observation about stubbornness. It never explains itself. The speaker is not punished, the victim does not protest, and the reader is left to notice that nobody has actually learned anything. That leaves an open question for readers: which of the two men, the one who lectures or the one who walks away comfortable, is more like us?