Open Your Mouth

Listen, hold your hand to your chest, feel the constant comforting vibration rising up from your lungs to the hollow in the back of your throat where you burrow under soft, slick tissue and bury yourself in the cacophony of your body. This is not a place, it is a song without words but you know the words and you hum the melody and rise a fifth for harmony and when you stop singing it stays in your head, notes multiplying, mutating. Your mouth is silent, your tongue is still, but deep in the hollow of your throat the notes burn bright and hot, each sound sealing itself in a chrysalis and emerging higher and lower, staccato, lagatto, still easily slipping into the warm comfort of the chords streaming around you like a many colored coat. You are not born there, you do not build it, you cannot find it. You must listen and follow. You must open your mouth.