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Lifestyle
Karl Stead

CK on Sunday: paying tax at 89

Photo: Getty Images

CK Stead on the certainty of taxes  

Say I do this  

Say I tell the accountant who does my tax,

or the IRD itself, that at eighty-nine  

it’s too hard to get the numberings correct –

too much fiddle. Say I make them an offer –   

a thousand, two at most.  I was recalling

our neighbour Dr André at Maunsell Road  

when a small fragment of steel got in my eye –

it was the weekend, he’d been drinking, and I watched  

his instrument waver toward my eye – and stop.

‘Don’t move’ he said, loud, as if he meant it. Later  

we had whiskey with Father Forsman looking out

on brown kids playing in his school-yard.  He said  

‘These are my Aegean Greeks.’  They were Pasifika.

One K should do it.  I’ve made fuck all this year. This marks the final poem in a series by CK Stead, on the beach at Kohi, dancing, and Peter Wells.

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