Is it important for a poem to be entirely true?
At what point should a poet learn to dispense with the truth and write something that is more poignant, more fantastical, more ridiculous or seemingly "more true" than the truth itself?
Here's a poem that describes me "crying bitterly on the front steps of the school" - something that never really happened, but whose imagining conveys a deeper truth of my desolation after leaving Year 12. Would it have been better if I had simply said I had become lost after leaving? What do you think?
alumni
high school was the same as from Harry Potter.
whorled by deep fascinations,
eventually each of us left, tastelessly.
i cried bitterly on the front steps of the school
as its night breezes touched my bare parts.
more than half my life
has been spent out of that time,
a few facebook connections keep the pace of living,
but apart from that i wonder why
and how and whether about my lost friends.
i remember shouting agonised on so many occasions
among the timbres of my family’s raucous ignorance:
and now those vain shouts echo in my thoughts:
across the globe, and deep into the years toward death,
i yell for old acquaintance to return.
