• Paraplegic

 

• a chair is a poem, rather than a novel.
• —Design Museum, Fifty Chairs that Changed the World

 

• Our greatest glory consists not in never falling,
• but in rising every time we fall.
• —Oliver Goldsmith

 

• Loh Guan Liang

A perfect chair
                     is one with broken legs:
          function becomes all the more
apparent, all the more precarious
          in the sudden face of need.
The hollow curve
of a chair’s back completes
          positions of authority and subservience;
chairs find purpose
                     in empty rooms.

When perfect chairs gather
          I listen to their shattered histories,
how they lost all sensation from the waist
          down
          and regained it after dropping
                     to the floor.
Time tilts our lives into place,
                     and like perfectly broken chairs
          we must not stop, we cannot stop trying
to stand with our backs proud
                      against the wall
even after our legs
                                 have taught us to fall.

>>

<<