Photographs when no one's watching 📸

Learning about someone through their digital artifacts.

I activate my dead stepfather’s phone

I activate my dead stepfather’s phone,
Find on it some pictures that he took,
A line of three burritos on a plate;
	After the overhead angle he
	Would have seen on my instagram;
Of which he would have had but ill to say
And which, no-less, he sought to replicate.

That is the one, the fifteen others are,
I think… but let me just take out the app…
—Self-portraiture! Four selfies with a cat,
	The neighbour’s, and…

The rest are lost. The roll has been reset. 
No doubt some other unadmitted scenes.
A life so private, that from these five I’ve gleaned
More, than from a decade worth of talk,
About the man, the dead; what taciturn
Departed things, uncaptured, won’t I learn?

Explanation

True story. My definition of “living within my means” involves refusing to pay for a new iPhone, so I am still using my departed stepfather’s iPhone SE. Don’t remember the SE? It is the size and shape of a 5. It was released the same year as the 6. 

(Update: this has actually changed since I began writing this newsletter. My wife upgraded to a new iPhone 13; I am the beneficiary of her cast-off iPhone 8. It does everything I want it to and, unlike the SE, doesn’t die immediately when the mercury drops below 17°C. 

What hasn’t changed: I am going to see how long I can go without paying for a new phone. I once paid $1000 for an iPhone and I regret that purchase to this day. No new phones, no new phones, no new phones no no no.)

Anyways, when I first turned on the iPhone SE, I immediately noticed the pictures that I have described in this poem. I was actually overcome by the pathos of it. 

What I am describing in the poem is the difference between the goofy, frivolous person that would have taken these photos and how my stepdad appeared to me. My assumption was that he was the kind of person who would scoff at the notion of taking cellphone selfies with a cat, or an overhead food shot as Instagrammers are wont. He would not have deigned, I could have sworn, to engage in such activities.

I also, in the poem, lament the fact that some of the other photos, originally present when I turned it on, got somehow deleted, and were not recoverable. I knew so little about the guy, that A) it would have been interesting to further examine some of these pictures, and B) the loss of these photos also symbolized the greater loss of him.

On a structural note, the poem tries to actively engage the reader, as if in a conversation. You’ll notice when I am physically withdrawing the phone during the poem, and noticing something that has transpired—some photos are missing—and reacting to that. This, I think, makes the poem more vivified; it is not a dead monologue from the past, but something a bit more alive. 

Life lesson

Talk to the people in your life! You have no idea what they’re like, how weird they probably are, how different from their overt social presentation of themselves. 

I basically never asked my stepdad anything. We spoke very little, as far as I recall… I was a teenager for most of the time we lived together, absorbed wholly by my own affairs. I regret this very much. Now, it is impossible to extract any wisdom from his mind. 

From what I gather, he was more reserved than average—my mom knew him better than my sister and I and has, I hope, benefited from what he knew and had to share. Those who are more reserved are precisely those with whom you should more deeply engage. A silent person is often hard at work on their thoughts.

Scansion 

• 17 lines.

• Some lines rhyme, others don’t.

• Mostly iambic pentameter, a bit of tetrameter with various feet, some truncated lines.