Each of us is no more
than a vault of moments,
a bank for remembered scenes.

Poets spend all that they save,
and I am one —
or rather, have been one,
for from this moment on

I refuse to fritter
a second more
in letting my mysteries out
for the world to pick up
like so many stray pennies.
Let it be someone else’s turn.

Yes, there are times
when it comforts me to think again
of the way her hair felt
the first time I touched her
on a Providence street;
there is more to say about that,
and I know ways to make others feel it too,
but I want to keep it for myself.

I could describe what it feels like to press
the point of a hunting knife into my chest,
adding a quarter pound of pressure
with every breath,
shaking and snotty with tears
until I pulled it away…
I could make that real
for anyone who asked,
but could anything I got back
make it worth my while
to transfer that
from my own private store
into the public treasury? 

So much that I saved
from youth to now
has ended up on stages,
spent for others’ amusement,
traded for glad hands
and shifting feet. 
What has it ever gained me?

Just give me now, at last, 
my hoard to hold for me alone.
Let me count my terrors and my ecstasies
in my own time, sitting up late at night
to avoid dreaming them out of my grasp.
Call me a miser if you want.  Complain
that it is not in my character
to be this selfish, and I will agree;
but Lord, how I wish I had been
less profligate with these
when it would have been wiser
to keep them close.

If I can learn to be tighter
with a memory now,
I might yet be happy. 

I could get a job
where no one will ever ask me
about who I was,
where I’d been,
how I view the search for meaning,
how I got here. 

It’s none of your business,
I will say if they ask me. 

Write your own goddamn poems,
that’s what I’ll say.