Life lines...

Life lines

The lines on my face

Tell a story

Years of smiling and crying

Leave creases in their wake

Stones of remembrance

symbolizing the passage of time.

The mirror keeps telling the story

Every day is another page

Pleated with folds

Like an earmarked book

Put there to help me remember

And look back at that page

That fold 

that marks meaning.

It reminds me on that one line.

The furrowed brows lengthen and widen

Plowed permanent by considerations,

The weights of life like gravity pull at the skin

Stretchmarks of stress and stewing

Brain a’ brewing

Dreaming and scheming

The plowman of pondering grooves

A trough over time.

Each wrinkle in time

makes wrinkles with time

laughter squeezes the face, too,

digging channels of joy

at the corners of mouth and eye

dimples that dapple a countenance

like aqueducts carrying refreshment

spilling into and onto someone else’s face

making its mark, leaving its marks.

The lines on my face

Tell a story

The landscape of skin

Peppered with paths trodden

By others, by me

Leave behind trails left by trials and

smiles of surprise, both.

Each worn on the pages of my face.

To read me is to read me line by line

Each line tells a story.

A wrinkle in time.