"An Ode to Taxes" by John C. Mannone

An Ode to Taxes

By John C. Mannone

          With apologies to John Keats

"Payment" Ink & Watercolor on Paper
By J. Artemus Gordon

How beautiful you are

under the feet of your

messengers or even mine.

I swoon at your delicate

words of clarity, truly

spoken as a bureaucrat

in love with itself. Your

math, admirable as your

mouth, as simple English.

Your style of arithmetic,

so self-serving. I love

your round-offs OXOXO.

Your forms are perfect,

simple & heartburn-free.

I stand up and salute you

for keeping the tax

beyond the war effort,

actually we need war

to keep you justified.

So go ahead, take

my money, my life,

I’ll sacrifice all of it

for you, you—that

Yankee-doodle-dandy

of an Uncle Sam.

You have a following:

State, County, Local

tax crazies, even the

Temples urge a tax

(they call a tithe) to do

what you had promised

about the poor, the kids,

the widowed (I know,

you don’t like churches

and synagogues, tough.)

I’ll sing you a love song

you, an elegy for your

probate—for the funeral

and inheritance taxes.

Simply put my ashes

in a hundred-dollar

cobalt blue Grecian urn.

Poet’s Notes:  There is always an opportunity to write something. We can “praise” things, even those that we do not like. Pablo Neruda wrote many of them, one every day at some point in his life. And though the federal tax season is over for most, some are still haunted by taxes often throughout the year, and most certainly daily for some things, like sales tax.  The long verse was to give a sense of relentless exasperation.

Editor’s Note:  IRS agents, liberals, and other statists will take this poem literally and not tax what passes for their brains too much. The rest of us will choke on the satire quite Swiftly.  Either way, I invite you to enjoy this classic by The Kinks https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ul3aH-WZkLE and this one by Keats https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/44477/ode-on-a-grecian-urn.