Leaving Earth

I’ve left Earth in search of a solution, a solar system promising testimonies and remedies and success stories. I’ve left in search of universal interest. I’m not certain that this term is in our lexicon. My grandmother’s garden is only outdone by the bees sidetrack, death racked, throwing in the towel. Take your trendy hashtag back. Though their low hums are music, their routes are inconsistent. I want the fate of that viral dying polar bear, want that pipeline taken out as easily as the burial grounds, want the Paris Agreement, want that big turtle with the plastic laced around its slender neck. Tight. Tears & blood, their tears & blood mortared on the internet dot com. I’ve left Earth, I am both sick of her inhabitants with their inclusive, self-affirmative, two-minute groundbreaking reflection, philanthropic, Ghandi Emmerson lovechild agenda. Neither she is buying this. She did not create your heavy machinery (though she created the very pathways on which they plow, eradicate, and trample over). She did not light your cigarette (though she obliges as you press the poisonous, hot sparks down unto her pure sandy shores). We did not ask to be part of your earth (though are we not earth? Her welcoming and loving arms that are slowly learning how to say no and to speak their mind?) I can’t stand your audacity. I’m sick of picking up your gnawed styrofoam Sonic cups. Each morning, I count their corpses in my yard. And in the moonlight glow, I apologize to the purple spring wildflowers for their disturbance. I reach for clovers & feel only weeds. Her crescendos and decrescendos, that Mother Earth. Now she’s glowing now she’s sighing. Snowfall, dogwood, lake water you claim to love but only for the aesthetic. I tried to understand you, but you spent your quiet dew morning days listening to the bluebirds and oven warm horizons across crimson fall leaves tell their stories yet ensure us that there’s more important issues to worry about. Maybe you’re asleep, but the chant of your anthropocentricism reverberates through my thin windows. Swear up and down this is God’s creation every Sunday morning but stomp as though she’s the eighth deadly sin without so much as a whisper of contemplation? But there is no heavy machinery for the non-human to retaliate back. Because the Great Lakes polluted, because DC calls climate change Santa Clause, because the greatest show on earth is something that requires currency, because the millions of plastic pieces littering corals in the Asia-Pacific. Because we work hard for our money and our American Dream and our taxes should go towards something more sensible. Because her branches, rudimentary to our human existence, giving oxygen to our greedy breath, is a bit too abstract, right? I’ve left Earth to give her space to breathe, where she can find a millisecond more solace without another existence’s demands tiring her, weighing her heavy eyelids. I’ve left Earth to find an aerial view. A way to better understand her condition with intentions to return to a common ground, not a battleground. Until then, I say farewell. I’ve left and I’m touching each star in the inky black sky and dipping my fingers into their dust. I’m taking snapshots of the green and blue clouds somehow still smiling before me. And here, in this cosmic state, you cannot toss or own or waist or spit or push or burn or claim or burn or claim or burn or claim