Ghost Tax

Just because you're dead,
doesn't mean all bets are off.
Yes,
I'm talking to you, the hazy figure
hanging by hemp above the staircase.

You lost your love?
Well, suck it up, Bo Peep.
No need to be shoving guests down the spiral,
breaking their damn necks
just to make a point.

Every night
for five hundred years,
the sound of a carriage on cobblestones 
wakes the household promptly at four.
Some of us have to work.
Did you ever consider that?

Today the postal carrier delivered
a dunning for the ghost tax.
I had to sign for it
with a cheap pen,
and all the neighbors staring.

Now, spirits,
render up a specified portion of your grief,
a legally apportioned fragment of your unrest,
until the incorporeal marrow 
forms a bone flute;

Hear, in the fog of morning,
how its notes serenade the empty wastes you call hearts,
following, like bad credit reports,
those worthies you loved and died for
in a daylight world now auctioned off and handed over.
_______