We are our own photographers

Image by Jerzy Górecki from Pixabay

We take fewer pictures of sunsets now,
fewer of gnarled branches and mountain ranges,
we looked at the camera and told it
to face us.

It has not stopped taking our pictures since,
at every turn and corner of our slow lives,
at every hump and groan of our fast roads,
we smile, or do not.

It is ear-to-ear or demure, we wear sardonic,
or crook a brow, chests heavy, with hope or hurt,
we stretch that arm when we love and feign love,
we take a selfie.

We include every silly soul behind us,
in parties, at work, when we wade into wakes.
We stretch an arm, insinuate ourselves
into snapshots of sunsets.

Our lives sear onto a form better than paper,
fixed and unflinching, events cannot be changed
by how others may remember them,
or by our faithlessness.

We record, not for the curious among
our kith and kin, we are photographers
of our own photographs, fleshing out
our personae.

We document the dull business of the day,
and the squandering of the nighttime,
our decline and decay, our bloating,
our greying.

Historians are euphoric, we are the generation
most documented, we were here, indubitably,
we all have diaries, they're on the internet,
floating forever.