Dear 47 Percent

Dear 47 Percent
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Dear 47 Percent

i am behind closed doors seeking rapprochement
eating your flavors drinking your spirits
you made a run last year between here and San Francisco and i was there
to catch your fall
lonely is the path to accountancy
the mind rebels dependency sells papers
notional news all the harrumphing of collection
sitting in tense positions across the table
we meet and greet brothers of the hollow Christopher science --
o why bother
yellow penance has climbed into unfilled tax returns
my mind is an unfilled tax return
i waited ten years -- or was it fifty-three -- to turn sixty-seven
and collect
something of the ardor of taxpayers
i do pay taxes
sometimes in acrostics
bright pouring birds
any silence of twilight
hurt vocabulary
chinese patterns
seneca waterfalls
i pay taxes on goofy unargumentative pieces of chicken thought
and yellow i was dependent no getting away from that
hence contemplation of the bridge to being alone with Kafka
i am masses of education
clusters of fumigation
beheaded passive household
are you there
forty-seven times i've called my name
paper this paper
paper weighs more than lives and my bright freshman calculations about money and such
i am forty-seven times a loser
in that grotto of overdetermination

Anis Shivani's debut book of poetry is My Tranquil War and Other Poems (NYQ Books, Sept. 7, 2012). His other books are The Fifth Lash and Other Stories (2012), Against the Workshop: Provocations, Polemics, Controversies (2011), and Anatolia and Other Stories (2009). His debut novel, Karachi Raj, is being published in 2013.

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