Poem: Writing poems is hard sometimes

Sometimes I want to hoard the words, not spend
their gold spilled ink across a page not
corralled and lassoed and tamed — let all go

unsaid, as the woods after the last bird
ends the evenfall chorus. But I write,
selfishly, pull a word from the darkness

and slap it down, then another and on.
Silence is a strange heroin, lulling
with the torpor of your own erasure

the lure of Santa Muerte: we die, so
let us die. And here I am still breathing
and thinking, collecting meaning — bright shells

from the swamping tide so soon to erase
my name. Selfishly, I refuse to sleep.
Selfishly, I am shaping a word.