Birds and Other Dreamers: Poems

This is the dream.

I am a comet,
stardust breath
and spectral tail ablaze.
In the blackest corner of
a starless sky,
I pace alone.
Through a forgotten orbit
out of desperation
for the familiar,
in loyalty to a rhythm
I cannot comprehend,
a millennium at a time.

Infinity.

You are born, and in that
instant my comet heart hears
the first notes of our song
and sets course for Earth.

By the power of dream
logic somehow
ice is exchanged for bone.
Stardust settles into green eyes.

Still it takes me 27 years
to move this body
into your orbit. But the
homecoming feels familiar,
expected, as if I’ve only
just left and come back having
forgotten something

important, until I wake
crying, begging. I don’t want to
return to the cold dark
of space alone. Explaining
I can’t bear to spend another
millennium out there, knowing
you may or may not be born,

knowing orbits can change
and I will have to lose you again—
search for you again.

In our bed, you smile. You
kiss each wet cheek and tell me
it was only a dream.

But it isn’t, I say.
This life is the dream.

- k.b. marie, "preface: a comet, dreaming"

This collection of fifty illustrated poems are a journey, an exploration of love and all its entanglements: attraction, fear, loss, and redemption.