The Art of Itemizing

Lists are to literary
Culture as bacteria
Are to, well, everything else.

You can scrub your documents
And finish every to-do,
But before long lists will grow.

Search through the earliest lit—
Few poems, a great many lists.
Before you get Gilgamesh,

You get a long list of kings,
Gilgamesh one among them,
No poem yet, just an item.

Offspring of segmentation,
All rhythm’s variation.