Ma(r)king It

Legless, unloving, infamously chaste:—

O scaly, slippery, wet, swift, staring wights,

  What is’t ye do? What life lead? Eh, dull goggles?

How do ye vary your vile days and nights?

—Leigh Hunt, “To a Fish”

“Must you always be making something?” the Devil asks. “Make, make—” *

Make war. Make peace. Make art. Make love.

Make it new. Make up your minds!

Back in the Early Paleolithic

When all other creatures made only

themselves (and baby selves, of course),

Even the goggling fish,

Disrespecting your God-given form,

The sole unsatisfied live thing,

You were whittling sticks and stones

To speculate new shapes;

Carving obese pregnant lady figurines;

And blotting the walls of cliffs and caverns with prints of your ochred palms.

The Yellow Emperor ordered all others’ books

burned, so that he alone “made history.”

At Pompei, Romans outraged Vesuvius with idiosyncratic inscriptions.

Lord Byron carved his name on the Temple of Poseidon at Sounion.

At Potsdam, Stalin found “Kilroy was here” graffitied in his NKVD-approved pissoir

And ordered a decimation to rout the competion out.

Now in this latter-day Abendland ("the West”)

A hundred million poets fear they’ll come to naught

Unless they make their marks among the best.

I'm one of them, confessed.

*Randall Jarrell, “A Conversation with the Devil.”

November 11, 2026