The Boneyard

“I’m digging up bones, I’m digging up bones, exhuming things that’s better left alone…”
Randy Travis

A few days ago I woke up inside of a headache.

It happens every year. It’s caused by accountants who are in complicity with the IRS. Everything must balance, all must reconcile. It’s a sickness. They’re obsessive tyrants inflicting punishment with each errant check written. In 2011 there were quite a few. Most were vagrants, sustained by the thin air of hope and promises!

Inside of a headache is a solitary padded room, the kind found in mental institutions, cold, no windows, no door, no mini-bar, a concrete floor, a bed bolted to the wall, no room service and a uni-sex toilet with no lid (the only perk!). I have a standing reservation there, made by my accountant. This year I vowed a short stint in that hell by promising to prepare taxes on time.

The following events transpired because of that promise:

Every January finds me in the boneyard
with my Assistant, working on taxes,
digging into checkbooks,
sorting out the details of last year’s train wreck.

Forensic tools lie arranged,
computer, red-ink pens, calculator, legal pads and laptops.
The conference table resembles an Operating Room,
A surreal stage to anatomically restructure the fiscal year.

We labor in lockstep, the IRS bell tolls.
The method is always the same. She digs deep,
exposes the financial bones of last year’s transactions,
facts without flesh, cold, dead, without feeling, impossible to recall.

We slog through all the checkbooks, try to sort it out.
It’s drudgery, slow, agonizing and torturous work.
Her patience is short. Sometimes she shoves. I often shirk.
My memory escapes, hissing like steam from Yellowstone.

This check, that check, for what? For how much?
Every check is a mystery, prompting an interrogation.
You forget to code, to label, to balance she says.
Your brain is a sieve, I work for an idiot. I agree.

My mind moans, digging is manual labor, hard and painful,
putting flesh on the bones of last-year’s numbers.
We break, walk next door for donuts, a reprieve
from house arrest, dragging our balls and chains.

The clock’s in hot pursuit with its incessant tick, tick, tick.

We continue the reconciling, resurrecting the corporate corpse.
This deal, that deal, they interlace, twisting, turning,
winding down an endless and tortuous road.
My mind spins cartwheels trying to assemble details.

Hours, days pass. Files lie scattered in random disarray.
Ledgers, checks and food scraps litter the room.
The table is a tornado aftermath, a primordial chaos.
We curse it and each other, but keep digging.

She threatens to resign. I threaten to accept. No one leaves.
A breakthrough…one gets done, then another, a third, one more to go.
We can see the light, until
she discovers some checks are missing.

Where are they? We panic, pound on the padded walls.
At wit’s end we call the bank, they lament the computers are down.
We fabricate the numbers, apply the sleight of hand.
The accountant calls and taunts us, prods with her tick, tick, tick.

The headache room is shrinking, its walls are closing in.
Our heads throb, endless numbers swirl, demanding closure.
Long-term confinement looms.
So little time, always no time, always no time.

We abandon all hope of early release,
incarcerated with last year’s bones.
Until we get the banker’s call
and reconciliation is achieved!

We break for beer, celebrate and come back for cleanup. In the process she picks up a checkbook and notices missing checks for 2012. What’s this, she says? You could see it coming. Sprinting from the padded room I yell, “Fresh graves for next year’s boneyard…it’s job security!” Her response, though unprintable, echoes in my ears.

Bud Hearn
January 19, 2012