Foreheads Learning to Breathe

By day the forehead is a locked archive,
creases stacked like fault lines holding back alarms.
Each thought tightens the skin’s horizon,
a brow clenched against invisible winds.

But night loosens the hinges,
creases drift apart like continents in slow amnesty,
and the face remembers water.

Sleep opens with no clear geography.
Staircases melt into feathers.
Clocks kneel.
Across the brow, lines become canals
where breath ferries itself quietly downstream,
lungs learning from tides,
worry dissolving into silt.

In dreams, the mind misplaces its armor.
Cities sprout inside ribcages.
Foreheads glow like blank pages under lunar ink,
rewriting injuries as parables.

Even fear appears barefoot,
setting down its weapons to listen
to fields growing where sirens once stood.

Sometimes the dream turns surgical,
hands of light pull splinters from memory,
smooth the scar-tissue of thought.

The brow sweats starlight, not effort,
creases breathing wide as cultivated earth,
rest healing what vigilance could never reach,
the body believing itself again.

When waking comes, it brings its questions,
its sharpened edges, its weight of consequence.

But…

The forehead hesitates,
holding the echo of that deeper breath,
remembering how silence once entered cleanly,
how peace fit the face without demand,
if only for the duration of sleep.