When the Tax Man Cometh--National Poetry Month 2026

 

Before ubiquitous on-line filing, many Post Offices stayed open late and even had employees outside to collect returns from cars to make sure they would be post marked before midnight.

In the U.S.A. April 15 is traditionally the date by which income taxes are due to be filed.  In the quaint days before most people filed electronically, it would be celebrated by TV coverage of long lines at urban Post Offices kept open late for the occasion as hordes of desperate last-minute filers tried to get their returns post marked before midnight.  These days when taxes are due, I am sure there is no less desperation, but much of it is hidden in homes as procrastinators stare at screens in horror when they realize that one critical document without which the return cannot be competed is missing or internet connection mysteriously fails.

Taxes stir up strong emotions—panic, loathing, rage, and self-pity.  Strong emotions evoke poetry.  A lap around web poetry sites turns up hundreds of posted poems.  Some, of course are by famous poets and others by competent published journeymen and women.  But many are by amateurs some apparently stirred to verse for the first time.  It should probably come as no surprise that most of the latter seem to be posted by MAGA types whose hatred of taxes, government, and the bloodsucking weaklings who drain fine productive citizens like themselves may be the strongest emotion they ever have.  Also not surprisingly, many of these poems have all of the poetic beauty and majesty of posts by internet trolls.  You will be grateful that we are ignoring those.

As for me, I don’t mind paying my dues to civilization.  Not that I approve of every expenditure or don’t cluck and shake my head over boondoggles and sometimes jaw dropping waste.  Sure, I’d like to pick and choose.  I don’t want my dollars paying for the drone that wipes out a village wedding party or lets some already fat cat get a second yacht.  But I am down with most of the rest of it and patently benefit from it.

If ever I forgot all of the good, useful, and critical things that Federal tax dollars have supported, the crazed mass layoffs and slashed funding for key agencies and service The Man Who Would be King, Elon Musk, and assorted lackeys and minions reminded me last year.  And I suspect many others including Trump's former supporters. 

My pain is in the way-to-complicated process of filling out the forms and filing and the angst it caused me annually until I gave up and let H&R Block figure and file them.  They usually finish with-in hours and have kept me out of jail.

Here is a sample of what I found.

My Two Cents

Generally, there are two problems

With money: 1. Getting it and 2. What

To do with it. Certainly the food bank

Needs your help. The bristled ant.

Girls’ volleyball and these days even

The water supply, even the sky.

As you may surmise by my raiment,

Drapings really, and the primitive

Medium of this message, I have little

To recommend re: 1. Whereas 2.:

Start small. Make a stack of quarters

Then knock them down like an affordable

Coup d’état. Pennies are mostly zinc

So there’s your source of zinc,

An excellent sunblock. If you crumple

A crisp, uncirculated bill then

Uncrumple it incompletely,

It’ll appear to have shrunk as vivid

Visual aid to the recession. Blame

The president. Blame Congress. Blame

Mexico. For dramatic effect

Abbie Hoffman dropped a few hundred ones

On the New York Stock Exchange floor,

The ensuing pandemonium shutting down

The world economy for a couple hours.

Vermeer-owning industrialists

Stared into the nothing-mist. Oil

Magnates and hotel highnesses stared

Into the mist. Squeak, squeak — tiny, pink

Rat-feet on the wheel. My father worked nights

Most his life then died young but we never

Lacked electricity or clothes. I hate

To suppose money makes everyone its slave

But nearly everyone I know is sleep-

Deprived and wants to send a robot-clone

Into work for them. Squeak, squeak. Often

Money, like gin, can bring out the worst

Although once, after a couple stiff ones,

My mother gave you her mother’s diamond ring.

Maybe she won’t remember a thing, we thought

But she wrote it off as a gift on her taxes.

— Dean Young

The author of Fall Higher

Difference

1

Catch us up
to where we are
today —

these pants!
this hair!

*

It’s been a good year
for unique, differentiated products.

*

I’m more interested
in quarks:

up and down,
bottom and top,

simple units
of meaning.

2

If self-love
were a mirage,

it would decorate
distance,

shimmer over
others’ eyes,

evaporate
on contact

— Rae Armantrout
The author of Money Shot

During the Vietnam War, Allen Ginsberg beat the drums for outright tax resistance.  Pete Seeger regularly recited this poem at concerts and rallys in the 1970s.

No Money, No War

        Government anarchy prolongs illegal planet war 

        Over decades in Vietnam

        Federal anarchy plunges U.S. Cities into violent chaos 

        Conscientious objection to war-tax payment 

        is a refusal to subsidize mass murder abroad 

        and consequent ecological disaster at home. 

        This refusal will save lives and labor 

        and is the gentlest means of political revolution. 

        If money talks, hundreds of thousands of 

        citizens refusing war-tax payments 

        can short circuit the nerve system 

        of our electronic bureaucracy. 

        No money, no war.

        --Allen Ginsberg 

And last but not least, my favorite, an import from the U.K.—Scotland to be exact—which evokes a pastoral past and foreboding.

Taxman

Seven scythes leaned at the wall.

Beard upon golden beard

The last barley load

Swayed through the yard.

The girls uncorked the ale.

Fiddle and feet moved together.

Then between stubble and heather

A horseman rode.

—George  Mackay Brown

from Fishermen with Ploughs