"kodachrome" poems
they're nothing but glorified bus drivers, said my father after i told him i wanted to become a pilot.
the opposite of love is not hate, but contempt.
what causes the kodachrome to fade little by little to grey? is it really bred of familiarity. the wear of gradually learning the truth about somebody. the minutiae of the everyday sanding away at the idealised, sculpural dream.
or is it triggered rather by the dull shock of an identifiable disappointment; the inevitable transformation towards sallow disgust justified by the devastation of slap-to-the-face betrayal or loss.
must we fulfill the dream simply to learn that it was only ever empty?
my father, a devoutly unspiritual pragmatist, had nevertheless as a young man fallen in love with the expansive embrace of the blue above. the son, grandson, and great-grandson of farmers, he worked his hands down to shredded red sores to put himself though flying school only to have his application for a commercial licence rejected due to a doctor's confounding eleventh hour diagnosis. colour blindness. an all-or-nothing man, my father never once returned to the enthralling blues, yellows and pinks offered up by the cockpit, and from that point forward became a farmer.
i gave up on the thought of becoming a pilot, and later, (much later), developed a fear of flying.
Nov 16, 2014
Nov 16, 2014 at 4:27 AM UTC
The black night’s ebbing tide
erased the only remaining hints,
the cresting long ocean swells
did not cleanse without a trace.
Adrift and lethargically bobbing
seaweed entangled teakwood box
of water-logged photographs, drowning,
surrendered from the heart of the sea
Like molted wild feathers cast ashore with the tide
to the coarse specks of rasping sands,
Darwin's dream in an emptied sea-bubble popped,
dissipated into its own haplessness,
bestrewn about an untrodden seashore
Washed out snapshots of life’s disregarded minutia
enchained to an ordinary forgotten Kodachrome moment
left out to the consequences of the ever fickle tides,
abandoned happenstance spilled by chance
upon another undiscovered world
The warped and bloated wooden box encasement,
hoary with swollen furrowed woodgrain s,
wearied by an enduring measureless moment adrift;
as if an ill-fated message in a misbegotten leaky bottle,
corked with marooned good intentions,
and images of disappearing dreams
flung out shipwrecked in barnacled azure glass
beneath a sky so far away
someone you used to know
Mar 4, 2017
Mar 4, 2017 at 9:37 PM UTC
the world is adorned with a million windows
the bleakest night has a thousand eyes
daylight shines into the globes darkest corners
truth will ultimately expose all lies
NASA’s satellites circle
Tropic of Cancer latitudes
cameras pinpoint the disease
metastasizing in the body of Homs
from stratospheric limits
sensitive lenses read the names
magic markers have scrawled
onto white sheets covering the dead
YouTube gets Oscar consideration
for grisly cinematography
a real-time visceral docudrama
of panting fascists gleefully tramping
through the desecrated streets
coolly administering a coup de gras
to a city on its knees, pleading release
from an **** of incessant bloodletting
twitter records desperate tweets
the batting wings of endangered flocks
furiously thumbing into the blogosphere
calls for UN intervention that falls on blind eyes
BBC reportage,
the global gold standard
for journalistic excellence
scoops the stories
of London based FSA partisans
awaiting repatriation to scatter
Bashar’s Kodachrome killers
Has the All Seeing Eye
who has graced us with sight
laughingly curse us with vision?
Does the
One Caring Eye of the Universe
bless us with perception
to haunt us with images?
Has
The One Thats Sees Everything
blinked closed the eye of compassion?
Has the horror of Homs
become too much even for
The Universal Eye of Love?
the opened eyes
of a dead child
reflects our
cold winter
of indifference
demoralizing
dehumanizing
a watching world
Music Selection
Grateful Dead Eyes of the World
Oakland
3/2/12
jbm
Mar 2, 2012
Mar 2, 2012 at 12:04 PM UTC
For a moment
it was Paul Simon
and Kodachrome
That moment passed,
but blessed by the memory
of Summer days down by
the sea and everything so bright
I go into the night that waits for me.
Sep 9, 2025
Sep 9, 2025 at 6:52 AM UTC
one thing we are never told
pictures taken in polaroid
have a way of fading over time
very much like you and me
and the picture we used to be
no longer has that kodachrome shine
it happens to the best of us
the color fade of wanderlust
bringing out the worst in black and white
one thing i'm relying on
although i'm barely hanging on
is the picture of us left in my mind.
Mar 11, 2020
Mar 11, 2020 at 12:07 AM UTC
No more the need to be notified
Presidential or otherwise seen
here on my phone, in groups or alone
like a poxy that drones, on my spleen
Over-informed and glossed over
too much information and such
handing me crap, what's up with that?
I think it's overly
much
I get it from FEMA and locals
problems close to my home
keeping it relevant, focused
like pictures made bad
Kodachrome
Oct 3, 2018
Oct 3, 2018 at 11:23 PM UTC
I have a penchant for sweetness
Sliding between tongue and gum
The cool kind
Not too intrusive
Carrying the fruit of some berry or another
Which slips toward me slowly
In celluloid dreams of my childhood
In sepia tints
Dotted with the bright reds of summer fruit
Dripping down chin
With the faded blue of skies
Forgotten
In the clean slide of Kodachrome
The fading sepia
Fails to show the whiteness of my toddler hair
Or the shining black curls
Of my father’s head
As he holds me in his lap
And I turn adoring eyes in his direction
Smearing a bright red dot
On his snappy new shirt I suspect
The tint softens the memories
And sets them.
Love, a bloom
Of red promises.
Jan 1, 2013
Jan 1, 2013 at 10:11 PM UTC
Black and white country
Novel youths hitchhike state sites
Kodak Kodachrome
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Digital photos
Novel youths hitchhike websites
Black and white country
Jun 10, 2018
Jun 10, 2018 at 2:24 PM UTC
"...FOR GREED ALL NATURE IS TOO LITTLE..."
first the city
ate an adjacent town then
put out a suburb
like a great paw
belched
a factory
devoured a well known
beauty spot
that was soon
forgotten as such
ate a field and
ate another field
the city's hunger
fed by greed
sent out pylons
striding across countryside
like giant
alien beings
vomiting asphalt
so that green was as if
it had
never been
its scenic magnificence
now only available
in an out of print
1930's guide book
even its memory
dying now with old Joe Hart
who managed to make it
past the hundred mark
the town he was born in
no longer to be seen
except in sepia
or Kodachrome
a picture postcard
(3 for 2)
in the bright new
museum.
***
The title is supplied by one Seneca the Younger (c. 4 BC – AD 65) that well known and renowned Roman Stoic philosopher, statesman, dramatist.
Jan 5, 2019
Jan 5, 2019 at 7:29 PM UTC
& AGAIN: "YES!"
He stepped out of
the photo
stretched and
gave a great yawn.
He had been standing by that
wall it seemed forever.
The sun shone
in black&white.;
Outside it was
night.
He had never seen his grandson
who lived in colour
on the mantlepiece just
newly born.
He strode out boldly
in 3-D
with the strange gait of a 2-D'er
trying to put his best foot forward.
It was a long long way to
the photo of Tipperary
and the smiling newborn boy
but by God he made it.
His grandson lay smiling
in a shaft of sunlight
that rocked him gently
and gently.
He stepped into the colour
and turned into a nice sepia.
He held his grandson
against his chest
smiling
in Kodachrome.
Then put him back
in the frame.
He managed to return
to his own black& white
as headlights travelled
across the ceiling
before the telephone rang
and the morning awoke
and sleepy feet from above
went to answer it with a yawn:
"Yes...yes. . ."
& again:
"YES!"
Apr 7, 2016
Apr 7, 2016 at 2:58 PM UTC
FOR GREED ALL NATURE IS TOO LITTLE
first the city
ate an adjacent town then
put out a suburb
like a great paw
belched
a factory
devoured a well known
beauty spot
that was soon
forgotten as such
ate a field and
ate another field
the city's hunger
fed by greed
sent out pylons
striding across countryside
like giant
alien beings
vomiting asphalt
so that green was if
it had
never been
its scenic magnificence
now only available
in an out of print
1930's guide book
even its memory
dying now with old Joe Hart
who managed to make it
past the hundred mark
the town he was born in
no longer to be seen
except in sepia
or Kodachrome
a picture postcard
(3 for 2)
in the bright new
museum.
Jan 6, 2016
Jan 6, 2016 at 6:17 PM UTC
It couldn't get any better,
Minolta's flagship XM system is launched,
Gotta have it with Kodachrome 64 ! Meanwhile
Fruupp have their "The Prince of Heaven's Eyes"
Ted Heath's "U" turn has unravelled
and the Liverbirds are on the pill,
for some the revolution is complete.
There's next year before the EEC referendum
with the chance to make the right decision.
I'll never forget my Dad's yellow
"Ford Cortina" before the Datsun
become a better prospect.
Roll on Kolchak Nightstalker
you're Chicago's last saviour.
United Nations resolution 366
has something to say
about South West Africa.
But at least Jessica Harper was
"Special to Me".
Nov 30, 2012
Nov 30, 2012 at 7:10 PM UTC
We are fragile figures. Our pillows at the outskirts of paradise. Befriended by dreams, the mind begins to process the day in Kodachrome. Once it starts, there's no turning off the pictures. She lies beside me. She's reached paradoxical sleep. I'm still on the outside looking in.
Take me there. Beyond the eyelids, where the mind wanders each night. To where the seeds of disturbance must be resolved within us. Some are strengthened. Others desolve as mist. This is how we survive. Chemical fires burn, become tides of memory. Pass the torch of preservation. Keeping them warm and remembered.
A miraculous routine. Live together. Dream alone. Desolate. Magnificent. My eyes are at the moment the apparitions are shut away. My mind in this place, a stretched fabric. Yet, it's far from alone. In the cataloging of miles and years, I sense an odd fellowship cresting without limit. I thought I saw her smile in agreement from her side of sleep.
May 26, 2025
May 26, 2025 at 12:15 PM UTC
Sad birthday for a little boy,
that day that he turned three.
His father dead, a nation mourned
for John F. Kennedy.
Sad birthday for a little boy,
who stood at Mama’s side
Could one so little comprehend
why his father died?
Sad birthday for a little lad,
before the flag draped form,
his salute forever frozen
in a frame of Kodachrome.
Mar 3, 2012
Mar 3, 2012 at 9:39 PM UTC
We’d made things once, things of substance:
Copiers, straight-sixes for Chevelles, Novas, Impalas,
And tons of film, of course, loaded into tiny Instamatics
Which accompanied us to everywhere and everything
(Unless they mystifyingly scampered away from pocket or purse,
In which case we drove, cursing and volleying blame to and fro,
Fifteen, twenty, maybe more miles to retrieve them
From the kitchen table or back of the toilet)
To document births and baptisms and weddings,
The in-betweens and hereafters,
(Renderings of children and dogs
Sitting under trees with blossoms of pink and red
The blooms implausibly bright, child and beast stolid yet smiling,
Or tableaus of tux-clad cousins and brothers,
Squinting blankly in the aftermath of a visual right-cross
Courtesy of the supernova-esque emanation
From the blue cube perched on the camera’s top)
So they would not be victims of the vagaries of memory.
All of that is gone--no, taken--from us now,
The means of production having embarked for Memphis or Mumbai,
Those things which sustained us now simply vestigial curiosities,
Like hand-cranked presses or ancient milking machines
We’d tittered at on long-ago school field trips.
The march of time and technology, to be fair,
But it has left us obsolescent as well,
Stranding us without context or clarity,
With access to neither advance or retreat
(The old photographs simply mock us now,
The red-eyed images fading to the soft tones
Of a rose at the end of its summer,
The name of the third man on the left,
Who’d worked on the line with us nearly three full decades,
Refusing to be conjured out of the thin air)
Leaving us diffuse and unordered
As the old and cracked negatives
Stuffed higgledy-piggledy between old snapshots
In an enveloped at the back of an old file drawer.
Feb 21, 2017
Feb 21, 2017 at 7:30 PM UTC
There's that same old
sun hung up in the sky
my my how
time goes by
he can only just
catch sight of
his dead wife's smile
as the earth treks
around that same old
star
the exact timbre
of her
voice
lost to him now
as galaxies revolve
the days torn away
from the fabric of time
the 1963
gas station calendar
with a bikini'd girl
smiling in Kodachrome
the dates
in bright red
telling it how
it is
63 days to be
exact
since she fell
off the edge of the earth
into the infinity
of death.
The dawn
inches up the lawn
like some wounded
creature.
Cartoon music
form a too loud
television
in another room.
He calls her name"
"June...June...June!"
Sep 15, 2015
Sep 15, 2015 at 7:42 PM UTC
I was thinking about the blast
of neon colors in a film
and the New Wave Music
and Marie Antoinete pastels
But in my childhood
it was as if we had other hues,
a small box of crayons at hand,
or that the world was seen through
Kodachrome film.
There were lollipop reds and purple
and dungaree blues, lake and skies,
lemon ice yellows, setting suns
and lush summer green.
In scratched lenses, children seemed to play
as if inspired by the living colors,
imagining that their lives would last forever.
And even as they grow, it immortalizes them.
But, like life, the colors decay
and we gaze at scenes of sepia and moss,
with ochre grass and reds turned brown.
We must attune memory to remember more.
And using suspension of disbelief,
Elders, middle-aged and children gather
Like the neolithic ceremonies meant for gods,
But celebrate, not the stars or stones,
Rather the lives we have lived or have yet to taste.
Mar 17, 2025
Mar 17, 2025 at 4:04 PM UTC
*one thing we are never told
pictures taken in polaroid
have a way of fading over time
very much like you and me
and the picture we used to be
no longer has that kodachrome shine
it happens to the best of us
the color fade of wanderlust
bringing out the worst in black and white
one thing i'm relying on
although i'm barely hanging on
is the picture of us left in my mind*
May 5, 2015
May 5, 2015 at 2:22 PM UTC
This is where I'm happy
And this is how I smile
This is right before the moment
I turn it all into a frown
This is me excited
I don't remember why
A picture snapped so long ago
That it's in black and white
This is me in memory
As distant as it seems
This is me dreaming
Kodachrome the color scheme
This is me swimming
Deep within my thoughts
This is where I'm counting
Soon enough to learn the cost
This is where I'm younger
This is the day that I turned old
Though they're both in color
The older me has faded more
This is where I wing it
And here I plan it all
Picture this if nothing else
Right before a fall
Oct 9, 2017
Oct 9, 2017 at 9:40 AM UTC