WRONG TURN

When that first thing
crawled out of the primordial ooze,
and onto land to suck in the first breath,
that's when it all went wrong.
It set the precedent for greed;
it was not content to live
with all the others
in its little pond.
It desired its very own resources
and abandoned the commune.
Ever afterward it grew fat
sucking at its own new world
in a gross, gluttonous display of
the most frantic fear;
fear that something would crawl up after it,
and they would have to share the same world.
It grew and multiplied,
spawned the modern world
in a spirit of avarice and self serving,
a world of me and mine.
It craled out of that sludge
and spit us out
and for some unfathomable reason,
we've always been grateful.