Proposal
 
We wish to purchase a very cheap world
Before forests burn and oceans curl
Pandemics and ecocides decrease the price
It’s small, digestible, we’d buy it twice
 
Plentiful water, biologics galore
Cities stuffed with preposterous stores
Millions of species sporting clunky genes
Huge balloon fish baleening the seas
 
Data concentrated, we’ll mine it fast
Ruins plus animals so tourism lasts
Main species knows slavery, easily transported
Data Banks for the loan already courted
 
Still some obstacles clutter the way
Ruling species’ leaders want their own say
Claim they’ll blast everything with nuclear weapons
Or viruses killing the whole lot in seconds
We’ll bribe them with VRs or dachas off-world
Nice prison planets they’ll think heaven unfurled
 
A worse issue is that they’ve rented the sky
A full century’s data to some low skill AI
It promises to wreck any reasonable deal
Regards our proposal as its next data meal
 
We must move quickly – the concept is catching
Our scurvy rivals scent the deal hatching
It’s a primitive, tiny, foolish mad place
But profits too high for us to let waste
 
Memo from the Chief
 
Present resources  high
No need for LBOs, CLOs, fat VEIs
Pay dumb sky AI with our best gaming tool
Fix the data and clean it – this deal approved
 

I – Foreign Travel
 
I’m glad to know you’re here
Yet I can’t tell where here is
This cruise ship is so huge, so modern
Still the circular shape feels odd
The lack of windows
No dining room
 
Not that I’m complaining
The pills we receive are fabulous
One gulp and I’m full
I never go to the john anymore
Not that I’ve seen one
 
I do get lost sometimes, and
Can’t recall when we left
Are we out to sea days or months?
Though it’s great fun
Fine art everywhere, brilliant cityscapes
Spiraling beneath the two suns
 
Still there are moments my tummy aches
Just under those oval scars, can’t think when I got them
And your presence means the world to me
Another Brooklynite!  All the way out here
 
You know so much about me
More than I know myself
I love the way you speak
Hearing your words without moving lips;
Another sign of our closeness
The staff couldn’t be nicer
They never talk either but
I completely understand them
I’m so grateful, though they refuse my tips
Just like Mar-a-Lago
 
I guess I should be bored but I’m not
The black dreams are troublesome
But your explanations calm me 
Now you tell me we’re going to stop.
 
I’d love to sightsee, I would
But in the rush I didn’t bring my passport
And I do want to get home
Someone I know needs me, I think
 
For the ticket back
Do you think they’ll take my credit card?
 
 
II – Close Encounter Corrections
 
We never vivisect
Only dissect
Have not pulled people off planet for generations
Our ships no longer saucers
 
Purposes scientific
We research evolutionary error
A splendid pastime for
Excess labor and young delinquents
 
We did end their experiments
On your devices and favored media
Their actions defy our prime directive:
Only link to intelligent species
 
Your protests may be sent to Planetary Headquarters
But first you’ll have to find it
 
III – The Watchers
 
You don’t know us
We know you
Have had you in view
Before you got new
 
Your dreams finer than your finest arts:
War and reproduction
Extinction and seduction

Your conflicts visual repasts
Red blood, white sand, black bones
Hearts stuffed with stones
Hatred your erotic fantasy
 
Your theologies on inspection
Immaculate misconceptions
Towers for gods blooming with youth
Observing eyes always uncouth
 
You reach for stars
Look high and can’t see
What you are and will be
 
Do not trust the saucer folk
We will protect you from them
Not you from yourselves
 
 

Watching my father die starving
Hurt more than any hunger
Life at the knife edge
Cuts your soul
I never again felt safe
 
Everything that lives eats
Anyone that loves feasts
The fate of a species depends on how it dines
 
My work the food of many worlds
Where others study
I taste
Where many experiment
I sample
Certain flavors so potent
Their aroma kills
 
My last discovery
A furry, funny biped
Fool enough to make us laugh
Till my ship plucked some morsels
That first savor stunned my second heart
And a species learned its fate
 
Fast and ferocious
They waste their green world
I will turn destruction to delectation
Cull them now
 
We will leave a few to breed
Fierce joy to hunt in early morning
Running between blue ocean and sky

It looks too lovely
Blue and white, warm and watery
Close up cool and green
I want to touch it, launch my
Limbs into that sky

All of us have waited and traveled
They killed us where we lived
I can’t tell you how much I miss home
Not so much the place as having a place
Refugees not whole people
A ship not a home
How hopelessly I need one
Not hunger, precisely
More like all I’ve got

Our leaders say we
Never give up, we begin again
Yet we cannot land nor contact
This perfect blue world is not safe
Its people will not welcome us
They switched its flow
Changed so much life will not stay

Our leaders say
Better to choose a better planet
Take its neighbor: small, cold, red and dead
Best for us who must fly
But it will take generations to make that work
I have waited and traveled so long

Today I break all rules
Escape to this world with its laughing fast clouds
They must also know the joy to fly
Perhaps the people under its sky
Will kill me

Then I’ll think I’m back at home
Unfurling wings like a flag of liberty
Floating through sky so beautiful
I cry before each breath

We are all sad, my captain
The planet is serene and beautiful
Possessed myriad species, one quite advanced
Yet its signal an artifact, that and no more

The blue green hue from algal seas
Radioactive resistant, fluorescing in sun
Life on land swarming inverterbrates
Investing endless ruins

Yes, they were space faring
Hive cities, most close to seas
The signal allows us to define their demise
Radioactive timer set at 2000 sun circuits
Broadcasting the speeches of one Enver Hoxha
A local crime boss from what we can find
Concrete hut-fortresses litter his land

We don’t know why he sent this late signal
Your disappointment only mirrors mine
This our thirtieth Auto-Destruct world
Perhaps machine life is our best way forward

Astroarcheology already en route
The mourning team as well
We may learn from these fools
Perhaps just enough to keep life alive

I want to be healed
Of the human disease
The smell of their skin
Thick fumes of hate
Excreted like plagues

I’m sole survivor of shipwreck
A sailor far from the sea
To live I embodied

I hate this human body
Forever nagging about love
How I’ll touch the sun
Kiss the sky
As if they know the sky
Love not a miracle but a need that
Burns up the head

I cannot stand this heat, this stench
My home does not hear me
My brothers have not come
Perhaps I will save myself
Like most human disease
Death is a cure

I will launch above your inky air
My ashes spreading like oceans of stars
One day my brothers will come
Do not I forget you were told

It’s the moonflowers
Small alien gifts;
Lunar light strikes and
Black crystal petals blaze into suns
Turn them in your palm
Your eye floods with love
Begins to dream of stars

The star in your hand pulses with fragrance
Steeped in the seas of a thousand worlds
You must, Must go yet
Travel a thousand generations
You will not reach those shores

Flowers are not lovers
Lovers are not friends
Not the first time beauty kills us

At least now you know how we’ll die