The role of true history in poetic craft

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.