Analysis of 110 Film
My eyes are old
Maybe failing now
I tend to recall days
Caught in the viewfinder
Of a bargain store 110 camera
Snapshots of summer picnics
Birthday parties and holidays
Until it, too, was lost
Long after it went out of vogue,
I choose to lie to myself
It actually went away in an exodus
Now, out of focus,
My eyes require corrective lenses
To read books and mail
In dim light, I stumble over
Letters and numbers
But my mind is fading, too
Overexposing those photos from
The effects of age
Until people are unrecognizable,
Backgrounds bleeding into question marks
It was so long ago, at a zoo, a fair?
I had my picture taken with
A costumed superhero
Someone else looking through the viewfinder
Yet it found its way into my mental collection
Like so many other things:
Glowing vacuum tube radios
Silent moving pictures
Walks along train tracks
Things that don't matter to anyone else
Because they don't fit anywhere but here
I'll keep them as long as I can
Yet, in the end, what the shutter captured
On rolls of plastic strips
Developed in the darkrooms of our brains
Decays like old celluloid films
We paid a dollar or less to see
Never expecting the intermission
Reel change to be the last time
It is played before a cheering audience
Scheme | ABCDEFCGHIJJKLDMNOPQRSTUDVWXMYZ1 2 3 4 5 6 7 V8 9 |
---|---|
Poetic Form | |
Metre | 1111 10101 11111 10010 10101100 11101 110010 011111 11011111 111111 110010101100 11110 111001010 11101 01111010 10010 1111101 0010111 00111 0110100100 11001101 11110110101 11110101 01010 11101010 1111101110010 1110101 1010110 101010 10111 111101101 011111011 11111111 1001101010 111101 0100011101 0111101 110101111 100100010 1111011 11101010100 |
Closest metre | Iambic tetrameter |
Characters | 1,236 |
Words | 230 |
Sentences | 2 |
Stanzas | 1 |
Stanza Lengths | 41 |
Lines Amount | 41 |
Letters per line (avg) | 24 |
Words per line (avg) | 5 |
Letters per stanza (avg) | 995 |
Words per stanza (avg) | 224 |
About this poem
We often look at life as a series of discrete events instead of a continuous timeline. Those things that really mattered, for whatever reason, are filed away for eternity. Yet as time passes, the fidelity of the memory becomes perturbed, distorted, or lost. We try to accept that version to be as near truth as possible, fading and all, because we don't want it to go away forever.
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Written on May 10, 2022
Submitted by n0qlt on May 16, 2022
Modified on March 05, 2023
- 1:09 min read
- 98 Views
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"110 Film" Poetry.com. STANDS4 LLC, 2024. Web. 8 Jun 2024. <https://www.poetry.com/poem-analysis/129027/110-film>.
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