The last time,
bipeds rolled high.
Things went badly from the beginning.
Witnesses said
earthquakes, cyclones,
just about anything terrestrial
would not have been as bad.
Some even prayed
for direct intervention
in the form of a giant
red-hot rock
like the one that
punched a big hole in the Yucatán.
That was silly:
even bipeds weren't that destructive.
The last time,
bipeds again.
These didn't have any fur,
claws on their toes,
and those funny iridescent scales
around their eyes.
They did no better;
only good thing about them,
they couldn't colonize the high latitudes,
at first.
Once they got good at
keeping warm, they exterminated
high-latitude species just as fast as
the tropical ones
in their incessant search for
new delicacies and
more depraved games.
Never could control their tempers;
many thought that was just as well in the end.
The last time,
we went with something exoskeletal,
something with fewer organ systems
something colonial.
A promising approach; you'd think that
cooperation would come naturally.
Nope.
Just like those self-destructive chordates,
cooperation worked pretty well with the ingroup
but, they were decidedly anti-"social"
when it came to dealing with the "other,"
a collective consciousness
was no better than the discrete approach.
If anything, they were more destructive,
if only because
they were better at it.
The last time,
we abandoned that branch
of the tree of life altogether
even though there was agitation
to give the slime molds a chance.
But we won't get fooled again.
This time,
we're going to let kudzu have a shot.