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Candid camera
Do you still remember all the fumbling
unboxing foil-wrapped spools with sprockets
the winding, slipping, missing, grumbling
bulky Brownie cameras that didn’t fit our pockets?
The endless stocks of 24 or 36 exposures
and all those filters, tripods, meters, lenses
getting aunts and cousins to say cheese and hold poses
exorbitant yet gladly paid printing expenses.
No more! Now digital we take thousands of shots
and all the tourists everywhere hold silver cubes that click
we download to our own PCs ten million pixel dots
upload them to the Internet and out thick albums kick.
But wait, the end is not in sight, our kids are twinkling elves
their smartphones have two cameras that do a double act
so while they’re snapping grinning friends they photograph themselves
don’t care their pictures facebook-bound can easily be hacked.
The next step isn’t hard to guess, some whizz kid will create
a camera so miniature, some tiny silver chip
that can be planted on his nose to photograph his date
as while they kiss she operates the camera on her lip!
© Johnmichael Simon
2013
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