Purpose and Photographs

The camera captures only a caricature of my cursed condition:

Forced facades framed and frozen forever,

Secrets and stories shrouded by senseless smiles,

And empty, expressionless eyes eternally engineered into existence.

Perhaps these prints provide only a porcelain type of permanence.

Like delicate and dainty dolls, they demand my dearest deliberation

Or else they will rebel and rot away from my reality.

I found them folded, faded and forgotten;

Though the tricky tides of time had tampered with the tangible

My mind and its memories were marred with mold as well.

Where the glorified ghosts had once gathered they are now gone.

Just as words are wanderers when waged in whispers

These frames had failed to find their forgers in my feelings.

Where had once been love and loss and lament

I now see only strangers and shadows.

This world is a worthless wasteland

If I cannot compartmentalize my confused consciousness

To pursue a phony and prosthetic purpose

Then that is just a terrible and terrific tragedy:

                     A curse.

        To fail to create the illusion

        That there is meaning in the universe;

        Where photographs are an empty delusion

        To give cause to the live we choose to traverse.

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The form of this poem is inspired by the poem Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. I decided to try inter-line alliteration, which is much harder than I thought it would be.

Photo from Unsplash