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

Michael McClure Was a Poet at the Birth of Beat-—National Poetry Month 2025

 

            Michael McClure reading in 1957, two years after his debut at Gallery Six in San Francisco. 

Michael McClure was there—an attendant the birth when the squalling slippery babe nearly fell to the floor before ardent arms saved it.  Which is to say that he was one of the five young, obscure poets who read in the smoky confines of San Francisco’s Gallery Six on October 7, 1955. That was the famed event where Kenneth Rexroth, a Bay Area bohemian bard of an earlier generation, introduced largely unheralded young poets Allen Ginsberg, Philip Lamantia, Gary Snyder, Philip Whalen, as well as McClure.  Famously it is where Ginsberg first read Howl.  A drunk Jack Kerouac refused to read his own work but cheered the other poets on, shouting “Yeah! Go! Go!” during their performances. It was a memorable moment and was almost instantly mythologized as the “Birth of the Beat.”

McClure went on to be a continued counter-cultural presence in the Rock & Roll era hobnobbing and collaborating with the likes of Bob Dylan, the Doors, and others.

McClure with Bob Dylan and Ginsberg in the late '60s.

McClure, poet, playwright, novelist, and documentary filmmaker was born in Marysville, Kansas on October 20, 1932 and raised there and in Seattle. He was educated at the University of Wichita, the University of Arizona, and San Francisco State College—where he studied with poet Robert Duncan.

He was the author of numerous collections of poetry, including Persian Pony (2017), Mephistos and Other Poems (2016), Of Indigo and Saffron (2011), Mysteriosos and Other Poems (2010), Rebel Lions (1991), and The New Book/A Book of Torture (1961).  

                                    One of McClure's many books of verse.

“McClure’s poetry combined spontaneity, typographical experimentation, Buddhist practice, and body language in performance to merge the ecstatic and the corporeal,” according to his Poetry Foundation bio.  Publishers Weekly noted of his work, “McClure infuses ecstatic direct address and colloquial diction with an exquisite sensibility, one that reveals the world in its ordinary complex gorgeousness.”  He frequently performed his poetry with musical collaborators, including composer Terry Riley, and recorded several CDs with Doors keyboardist Ray Manzarek.

He wrote more than 20 plays and musicals, several television documentaries, and the song Mercedes Benz, which was made famous by Janis Joplin. His 1965 play The Beard, which depicted an imagined sexual encounter between Jean Harlow and Billy the Kid, gained notoriety when it was unsuccessfully brought to trial on charges of obscenity.  Kerouac based the character Pat McLear on him in his autobiographical novel Big Sur.

McClure's honors included a fellowship from the Guggenheim Foundation, a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Alfred Jarry Award, a Rockefeller grant for play writing, and an Obie Award for Best Play.

                                                    McClure was even honored on a postage stamp.

McClure taught poetry at California College of the Arts for over 40 years. He lived in Oakland with his wife, the sculptor Amy Evans McClure, before his death on May 4, 2020 at age 87.

McClure burst on the scene reading this poem at the Gallery Six event.

For the Death of 100 Whales

In April, 1954, Time magazine described seventy-nine bored American G.I.s stationed at a NATO base in Iceland murdering a pod of one hundred killer whales. In a single morning the soldiers, armed with rifles, machine guns, and boats, rounded up and then shot the whales to death.

 

Hung midsea

Like a boat mid-air

The liners boiled their pastures:

The liners of flesh,

The Arctic steamers

 

Brains the size of a teacup

Mouths the size of a door

 

The sleek wolves

Mowers and reapers of sea kine.

THE GIANT TADPOLES

(Meat their algae)

Leapt

Like sheep or children.

Shot from the sea’s bore.

 

Turned and twisted

(Goya!!)

Flung blood and sperm.

Incense.

Gnashed at their tails and brothers

Cursed Christ of mammals,

Snapped at the sun,

Ran for the Sea’s floor.

 

Goya! Goya!

 

—Michael McClure

 

McClure mature.  He would have enjoyed the rhyme. 

The Chamber, dedicated to Kerouac, was included in McClure’s Of Indigo and Saffron: New and Selected Poems published in 2011.

 

The Chamber

for Jack Kerouac

 

IN LIGHT ROOM IN DARK HELL IN UMBER IN CHROME,

     I sit feeling the swell of the cloud made about by movement

 

                 of arm leg and tongue. In reflections of gold

           light. Tints and flashes of gold and amber spearing

                     and glinting. Blur glass…blue Glass,

 

             black telephone. Matchflame of violet and flesh

                 seen in the clear bright light. It is not night

 

                and night too. In Hell, there are stars outside.

            And long sounds of cars. Brown shadows on walls

                                       in the light

                           of the room. I sit or stand

 

                 wanting the huge reality of touch and love.

            In the turned room. Remember the long-ago dream

 

   of stuffed animals (owl, fox) in a dark shop. Wanting

             only the purity of clean colors and new shapes

                                     and feelings.

                 I WOULD CRY FOR THEM USELESSLY

 

                   I have ten years left to worship my youth

                      Billy the Kid, Rimbaud, Jean Harlow

  IN DARK HELL IN LIGHT ROOM IN UMBER AND CHROME I

                                                                                            feel the swell of

smoke the drain and flow of motion of exhaustion, the long sounds of cars

                                                                                                     the brown shadows

on the wall. I sit or stand. Caught in the net of glints from corner table to

                                                                                                                       dull plane

from knob to floor, angles of flat light, daggers of beams. Staring at love’s face.

      The telephone in cataleptic light. Marchflames of blue and red seen in the

                                                                                                                            clear grain.

I see myself—ourselves—in Hell without radiance. Reflections that we are.

 

              The long cars make sounds and brown shadows over the wall.

 

                               I am real as you are real whom I speak to.

                   I raise my head, see over the edge of my nose. Look up

 

                    and see that nothing is changed. There is no flash

                            to my eyes. No change to the room.

 

    Vita Nuova—No! The dead, dead world.

                     The strain of desire is only a heroic gesture.

                       An agony to be so in pain without release

 

                             when love is a word or kiss.

 

—Michael McClure

My Chicago Summer of ’68 Part VII—A Foggy Night

Allen Ginsberg chanting in Lincoln Park.  A night session in the fog would be interrupted.

Note—I encountered Alan Ginsberg in a fog and other people get their heads cracked again.

It was a chilly, damp night and pitch dark by the time I made the Lincoln Park after a long walk from the Coliseum and Grant Park with a pit stop at the Mark Twain Hotel.  A thick fog rolled in off the Lake.  The later it got, the thicker it got.  There was no program, no performances, or speech making, at least where I circulated.  The crowd grew, milled around, and tried occasional chants.  The enemy—the police—were invisible behind those fog banks.   Some folks began to build barricades of park benches, picnic tables and trash cans.  That made me nervous.  I moved away from them.

Not long before 11 o’clock, my attention was drawn to drumming and a flickering fire away from the main crowd.  It was further south, close to where La Salle Street turned east-west and formed the edge of the park.  My guess is that we were not far from Cardinal Cody’s mansion.  It was hard to tell.  And my memory might be faulty.

As I got close enough to see what was going on, I found a knot of maybe a couple of hundred people.  At the center, sitting cross legged and looking serene, was Allen Ginsberg chanting “Om, Om, Om, Om, Om Mani Padme Om.”  As he droned, the tension seemed to drain a bit among those surrounding him even as the moments to a sure assault ticked by.

Esquire's "special corespondents" convention week--William S. Burroughs, Terry Southern, Gene Genet, and Alan Ginsberg.  Southern drank, Ginsberg tried to bring peaceful vibes by meditation, and the fierce Genet hoped for bloody revolution.

Ginsberg was there with a posse of writers, supposedly as observers and journalists, not demonstrators.  With him that night were the Beat novelist and junkie William Burroughs, the French playwright and novelist Jean Genet—always described in the press as the “hoodlum poet”—and the American satirist Terry Southern.  Of course, I could not have picked any of them out of a line up.  But Ginsberg was easy to recognize.

I learned later from a story that Southern published in Esquire that the band had arrived in the park not long before me after a day of drinking.

I almost forgot about the militants building those barricades behind the banks of fog.  But tension rose as 11 PM passed without apparent police action. 

I’m not sure how much time passed, but eventually I decided to head back to the Movement Center thinking that maybe the cops had decided to pass up a battle in the fog.

Once again I was wrong. Not long after I was out of the area, teargas mixed with the fog and formations of police attacked the makeshift barricades, clubs swinging.  Ginsberg and company evidently eluded the police, but under cover of that fog some of the worst beatings of the week were administered that night.  Press members, especially photographers, were singled out and attacked so successfully that I know of no pictures taken in the park that night after the attack began.  Eventually the cops once again pushed demonstrators out of the park and into the streets of Old Town.  They continued to fire tear gas in the neighborhood.  When local residents began to offer shelter to fleeing protestors, cops stormed front porches and beat them senseless on their own doorsteps. 

For the second night in a row I had missed the main battle.  When the kids straggled into the Movement Center with fresh horror stories, I began to feel like a deserter under fire. 

Next—Wednesday afternoon at the Band Shell and searching for a breakout from Grant Park.