The idea we’d take our place among the stars,
and leave behind our taverns is a joke.
They’re smart, hitchhiking parasites, you see.
They ride on the backs of Universities,
They get in the heads of artists who spread ‘em around,
and engineers who’ll get them off the ground,
and businessmen who’ll make the whole thing go.
We’ll pack a pub into a giant gun
and shoot it all the way to Kingdom Come
just like in Méliès’ moving picture show.
“So where does all the booze come from?” you ask.
I think we’ll leave the liquor in the past;
the intoxicant of the future will be weed.
Dutch ideas and Irish architecture,
with Japanese geneticists to lecture
on cybernetically cultivated seed!
And astronauts, who spend their grueling dayscarving canals and assembling solar arrays.
will sit at the bar and burn away their sorrows.
I bet they’ll bitch about their robot bosses,
and boldly boast they’re gonna cut their losses,
and hop a Greyhound back to Earth tomorrow.
Pity the Martian bartender has to hear
the same damn thing six hundred nights a year,
but even life on Mars can have its perks.
Though dust devils and dizzying cosmic rays
can leave the astro punters in a daze,
at least they’ll have a refuge after work.
And so the Irish pub will make its stand
‘til rocky, ragged, red and rusty land
is terraformed for amber waves of grain.
Then it’ll gaze at Jupiter and wait
for we, the shoulder-to-shoulder, struggling apes
to rise up because we've run out of room again.
