A poem about surveillance culture might use keep tabs on to describe the relationship between the state and its citizens — the watch maintained not with visible guards but through the distributed attentiveness of digital infrastructure; In a love poem that shades into obsession, to keep tabs on the beloved is the transition from care to control — the poem's examination of the exact point at which devotion becomes possession; A poem about a parent's relationship with an adult child might use keep tabs on to describe the modified form of parental attention that replaces direct oversight when independence arrives — the check-in, the news, the informal tracking that is love's persistent form; In a political poem about journalism's social function, keeping tabs on power is the democratic necessity — the press as the institution charged with watching those who would otherwise operate without accountability; A poem about grief might describe the mourner keeping tabs on the absent — tracking anniversaries, following the now-independent trajectory of the deceased's influence, maintaining a kind of running account of a life that has ended; The accounting origin of the phrase — the tab as a running tally — suits poems that explore how we accumulate information about those we are responsible for or anxious about, and what we do with what the tally eventually reveals