Classic Poem

I'ma TELLIN' you TAXES IZ nuts. There
is no god damn use of TAXES.
— Ezra Pound (1935)

Virginia Woolf thought that the income
tax, if it continued, would benefit poets
by enlarging their vocabularies and I
dare say that she was right.
— Wallace Stevens (1942)

Me, I don't care what anybody says,
Or does, or thinks, including me. I don't.

I pay my taxes as religiously as
Serafima Astafieva danced,
No more, no less, I render unto Caesar
What's his; what's his I render unto Mammon.

They say Thank you . I say You're very welcome .
(Here is her picture in a peacock headdress.)

I volunteered to go to Vietnam
When I was in the Navy. Why I don't know.
Whim, say.
And now I am a veteran.
I was the man, I suffered, I was there,
More than Whitman. I signed on the dotted line,
Got up at reveille, took orders, fought,
More than Hemingway. I served my time,
More than Melville.
American literature
Is eaten up with the experience of
Experience. Face facts , it says; Face facts .
I wonder why we worry so about it.
You can't not have experience, you know.
It's silly.
Emily Dickinson
Knew all about the world firsthand without
Even leaving the kitchen. You don't have to fight
To write The Red Badge ; for " Gerontion "
You don't need eighty winters on your head.
How old was Shakespeare when he wrote King Lear?

We don't accumulate experience.
Thunder.
We are born on one floe, reborn on another —
Another and another and another.
Hawthorne knew nothing, but there he is.