When I go out of the room, not nothing happens there.

They change chairs, eat, invent stories I do not hear,

And tell me, when I come back, some best things said,

Fill a clean plate, re-laugh, turn toward me a chair.

It is as if I had returned from the dead.

When I am away, I reach, reach in letters you I miss.

When I come home, into the room, I feel myself press

The scene back, and my self fill it almost too full.

While I am there, it racks me not to say yes and yes,

Not be a coated arriver hell-bent pell-mell

To tell all. But it never works out quite that way.

If it helps, it hurts. Saying all I have to say.

I know a room you can break out of, or can build.

If it hurts, it helps if you throw everything away.

When I am not in the room, the room is filled.

And I have thought that is the way death would be.

That's the way it is, I thought, that I do die

Every time I leave the room, to those who talk on.

I have always come back. I want to hear what they say

Together when I am gone and stay gone.