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