I don’t want to be an astronaut.
The thought makes me feel small.
I want to be an alien,
something to marvel at;
I want to be new and exciting and out of this galaxy.
The problem with believing in Vulcan
is the fact that we can’t even get humans to Mars.
How will we find somewhere else
when we’re confined to our own solar system?
We barely know anything about the depths of our own ocean.
The universe is still expanding but Andromeda is crashing
into the Milky Way at the most excruciating rate.
Why do we let ourselves think so small?
Where do you see yourself
in fifteen years?
Fifteen years away from here.
How do you major in dreaming?
How do you achieve
financial stability
with daydreamer words?
The problem with believing in Mars
is the fact that it has been thirty-seven
years since we touched the moon,
thirty-seven years since we let ourselves believe in touching the stars.
I don’t want to go to the International Space Station.
I don’t want to go to Mars.
I don’t want to stay in this solar system.
I want to take the distance of thirty-seven rotations
of Earth around the Sun,
and stretch the miles, square them,
multiply the kilometers by tens until
the astronomical units start adding up.
Only then will I know that I have gone far.
But how do you get SpaceX or the government,
to fund a mission
to explore new worlds,
to seek out new life and civilizations--
How do you boldly go
where no one has gone before,
when every penny is going
towards building a wall?
The problem with believing in democracy
is that we haven’t seen its true form since Ancient Greece.
How can we strive for unity
when we
amplify the voices of genocide
and silence any movement forward?
The problem with believing in progress
is that history repeats itself,
and we can’t see it until it is too late.
The problem with destroying our own planet
is that we don’t want to push out into space.
The problem with being human
is that I can’t seem to ever learn my place.
The problem with being a dreamer,
the problem with being a poet,
the problem with being an artist,
the problem with being a writer,
the problem with breathing:
eventually,
we are going to have to pay for air,
because oxygen and nitrogen
will be precious commodities with an overflow of carbon;
because argon and helium will be all gone without medium;
because while green energy watches from the sidelines,
we use fossil fuels to cloud our atmosphere
like we are trying to choke ourselves out.
Somewhere deep inside of each of us,
we don’t want to be here.
We dream of intelligent life because we are lonely,
reaching into space with one hand
and crushing each other with the other.
We would like to believe that we would be accepting
of alien life and cultures,
but we cannot seem to accept the life and cultures
of our own fellow Earthlings.
The problem with believing in Vulcan,
is that we are under the impression that
they would want to go anywhere near us,
that they would accept our offered hand,
with all of its scars and nuclear bomb marks.
We cross our fingers that there is other intelligent life,
but if they are anything like us
then why would either party want to get involved?
Why, when we sit at the brink of destroying
our own home,
would someone else open their doors to us?
The problem with believing in Earth
is that every single time we get so far,
we trip and fall and have to start all over.
How many more scraped knees can
humanity put Band-Aids on and heal over
until the scrapes start to scar?
I don’t want to be an astronaut.
The thought makes me feel small.
But I don’t want to be an alien,
a refugee of somewhere war-torn,
where the strangers of better places
lock their doors
and turn their backs on us,
because it’s our problem, not theirs.
I don’t want to be everything that we already are.
revised from 757 words to 697