We Will Never Leave Earth

We will, never, leave Earth. Except as dust and ashes and minerals, returned to the sender, to be light, burning, in someone else's stars.
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Earth from outer space
Earth from outer space

We will never leave Earth.

Battlestar Galactica is a lie.

Star Trek is a lie.

Alien is a lie.

We will never leave Earth.

We will never leave Earth because we will spend the time we have left and the one chance we have to leave Earth bickering over who did what to who.

We will never leave Earth because instead of building spaceships, we decided to build walls and razor wire and prisons and bombs instead.

We will never leave Earth because we aren't building space elevators and warp drives and new kinds of space suits and lasers -- just in case we ever meet anyone as petty and mean as ourselves out there.

We will never leave Earth because we're too busy building tanks to fight over the last barrels of oil and planes to drop the bombs we made on the people who disagree with us over the specifics of the story about where we all come from.

We will never leave Earth, even though all our stories agree, that heaven is above us.

We will never leave Earth. Even though Stephen Hawking says we've only got 200 years left. The last 2000 don't give us much hope.

We will never leave Earth because so many of us have agreed that passing laws about what someone else does with their genitals is more important, than leaving the Earth.

We will never leave Earth and we will sink and drown on this ship while we fight over the deck chairs.

We will never leave Earth.

The Last Starfighter is a lie.

Babylon 5 is a lie.

Star Wars is a lie.

Iain M. Banks is a lie.

We will, never, leave Earth.

We will never leave Earth and we will never be anything more than a strange thought the universe had, a moment in which it went, "Heh, wouldn't that be crazy. Na."

We will never leave Earth because the world will erupt in fire and ice while we're still debating whether or not fire and ice actually exist. We will still be arguing over whether we're burning or freezing to death when we die.

We will never leave Earth and the few robots we've sent out in our place will be our only fingerprints on the firmament, the only proof that a grabbing, desperate hand shot out of our coffin, before it sunk beneath the soil.

We will never leave the Earth and meet Aries, Taurus, Gemini, Cancer, Leo, Virgo, Libra, Scorpio, Sagittarius, Capricorn, Aquarius, or Pisces.

We will never touch Gemini's face and hear her say, "You look just like me. You look just like me."

We will never leave Earth because we're too busy arguing over who you're allowed to love to bother actually doing the work of love, of leaving the Earth.

We will never leave the Earth because we're obsessed with the soil we were born on and we never realised that all the dirt that we stand on and all the dirt we're made of, isn't dirt. It's star dust. Our dirt, is their dirt, and we will never ask their dirt for help and so, we will never leave earth.

Carl Sagan is a lie.

Douglas Adams is a lie.

Guardians of The Galaxy is a lie.

Space Quest is a lie.

We will, never, leave Earth.

Except as dust and ashes and minerals, returned to the sender, to be light, burning, in someone else's stars.

__________

This poem appears in the collection of short stories and prose, "How to be Happy: Not a Self-Help Book."

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