After the Flood a fleet of starships fashioned from seashells and preserved paints
launched to gather relevant info on the remaining planets.

I was a captain. I was the most fertile of the remaining humanoids,
and along with a crew of semi-fertile women I canvassed:

All of us fell in love with each other, as was the plan.
But something went wrong in me. I had contracted something

during the eviction ceremony, and it developed in blooms
on my penis, and I only grew sicker, as did my female crew.

We lost touch. We began filling our data drops to the shamans
with lowbrow erotica and crude drawings of "vision-positions."

Within most of our anatomical drawings the vagina stood taller and toothy,
a synthesis of mouth and gonad. Upon analysis of X-rays we found

the cruelest joke: Our tumors were thoroughly spread.
One of which resembled a moth, another a horse.

We stopped discerning dream from woken life.
We made love, though it had become so white with pain

that some of us screamed, and we did not know, finally, if we were alive
or dead. Now I am the last, the rest dead or too feeble minded to eat.

As I walk the halls of my ship I see chimps hanged from their bio-ports,
other strange animals in spacesuits covered in ink and nail polish.

Here was once a vast space of orgy and feasting. How I miss the sad Earth,
as in Her tunnels I once ran, like the rest, from the Sun. How I miss my people.

If anyone can hear me, please tell them I love them
and that I'm not coming back.