Dead Astronauts Part 2

Let's admit it: space is scary. We live in a tiny bubble in a very hostile reality. If you were instantly transported out of our bubble and anywhere else in the entire universe, you would die in seconds. Every time. It's too hot or too cold, there's radiation and solid objects moving very quickly. Things are blowing up and coalescing. Maybe, just maybe, there's something...someone out there too, watching or perhaps plotting.

That being said, I want to explore all of these frightening and dangerous things. I want to stand on the solar-wind swept surface of a lifeless rock, looking into the blue-hot face of a star that takes up my entire field of view. I want to feel heat and cold unlike anything experienced on my home planet. I want to shake hands (or membranes, or tentacles or pseudopods) with the natives of these strange new places. I want to stand on the surface of a titanic planet, and gaze on a mountain the size of the continent I was born on.

Obviously, I can't. I'll die. Even if I wouldn't, these places are impossibly far away. Our closest neighbor star (proxima centauri, the nearest centaur) is 4.24 light years away. If I was born today on a state-of-the-art spacecraft travelling towards it at maximum velocity, I would die of old age before we arrived. So the best I can do is chew up scientific journals like travel brochures of the most far off and exotic places that will ever be. They might as well be fiction, they're so impossible to reach. And if they're fiction, I might as well create a few of my own.

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Dead Astronauts

silent
sleepless
star sailors
visors down
so your face becomes theirs
too close to death
to reach the next port
even when they were born
stepping aboard
celestial schooners
sacrificing their minds
and bodies
for a scant chance 
at being a corpse
washed up on strange shores
exposed to blackness
beyond the backdrop
of the stars that scar our ceilings
while the rest of us slowly circle
staring at our hunters and swans
crabs and bulls
lighthouses
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There you have it, post number sixteen. (approach with trepidation)