✒Folding Chair

A poem

Folding chairs (and I do mean a particular thing by that) have been a part of my life for as long as I can remember.

The only part of the chair you need to see.

I set up dozens of folding chairs twice a week for various church services.

I put them away when those church services concluded.

But like many things, folding chairs bridged the sacred and the utterly, mundanely secular. Whether you are comparing spreadsheets for a bank, or bowing your head in silent prayer, you can place your butt in a metal folding chair and never think a thing of the factory produced, apocalypse proof chair you are sitting in.

The folding chair as such is an object created with a single purpose in mind. It does one thing.

It holds butts.

Sometimes it holds butts with a lesser or greater degree of comfort depending on the state of the cushion, but it always holds butts.

Being forged from metal, these objects occupy a strange middle ground: virtually indestructible, but not ageless. They rust. The metal bends. The cushions deteriorate. But they refuse to give up their basic function.

They hold butts.

The plastic chair, popularized a few decades later, is an interesting corollary. I’ve never seen one tarnish, but they frequently rip or shatter beneath the brutal machinations of excited adolescents. They are easier to move and store, typically brighter in color, and sometimes easier on the eyes, but they lack the fundamental certainty of the metal folding chair.

While others have compassionately cataloged the unacknowledged chairs of academia, I’ve never seen a good write up of the metal chair. There are reasons for this of course, two that I can think of:

1. An Aristotelian view of objects as things “created with a specific purpose/to be used for only that purpose lest we doubt the ineffable plan of the divine order” (Like butt holes, gender, and books used to prop up tables).

2. The overstuffed life saddled on each of us by the industrial present.

Oh folding chair, oh folding chair, here since before The Carter Administration, I write this poem for you.

Folding Chair

I move across the room, 
turn, 
and without so much as looking, 
place my hindquarters squarely in your waiting arms.  

When I sit, the fat stuffing of your cushion,
wrapped in an indescribable elasti-plastic,
tattered,
but holding air (against all logic) 
slowly eeks a whiffle-fart whimper. 

I am sitting on you now. 

Like those holy men who recite by heart all the names of God,

you have have memorized all the words for Ass. 

Rump. 
Butt cheeks. 
Tail.  

How many children have bounced upon your lap? 

How many cups of hot coffee spilled on your waiting body? 

How many times have you been bent and broken over a knee
to be crammed away 
with your brothers and sisters
in a cloistered, lightless cell? 

How many times have you 
screeched in metal on metal agony, 
reanimated 
just in time for Thursday night's potluck, 
or Tuesday morning's conference call
about tax deductible status, 
where the Asses flap their top mouths to emit face-farts 
outside your comprehension 
but within your hearing. 

Derriere.  
Kiester. 
Tush. 

I am writing a poem about you now,  
and I have already forgotten what I'm sitting on. 

Haunches. 
Ham Hocks. 
Mud Flaps. 

I jump up, 

turn you over, 

and lie down with my legs draped across your metal frame. 

You are cold on my calves. 

You are a starship.