Gorillas In The Mist

Stormy Daniels may be big news, but bigger news happened at the Philadelphia zoo recently. A gorilla was caught on tape walking upright on two legs, hurrying along, arms swinging, as if running to catch the 8:14 to town. This, once upon a time, was us, and in another hundred thousand years or so, with continuing favorable mutations, the descendants of this gorilla will be a new species, h. gorillus possibly, the inheritor of Earth, with h. sapiens being listed in the textbooks in alphabetical order with Neanderthal and the rest of our lengthy list of hominin cousins. But what will life be like for h. gorillus when he, as new man, is finally elevated to ruler of the world?

Once upon a lengthy time
New man first took an erect stance
Tottered like a drunken mime
And then he learned to dance
Sooner than you well might think
New man was kissing sweet young things
And then in just a blurry blink
Exchanging wedding rings
Next it was his awful fate
To be well dressed in pinstriped suits
And recognized but much too late
That wife had put down roots
Nights out with the raucous boys
Were memories of times gone by
Stifled by life’s stapled joys
And not ashamed to cry
Rash gorillas in a mist
Should never walk upright in view
You may watch if you insist
And find that you’ll cry too