Audition piece

Wake up in the dark. Listen to the rain mimic the song in the dream you were just having. Watch the new Winter light hatch the day, a coral polyp, purple in the bottom of the ocean- bursting. Remember what cold is. Remember the sound cold makes, the disgruntled sound of the faucet, feel that sound. Lonely and alone, the accentuated alliteration of feeling- the way the "L"'s role careless off your fingertips and collect in puddles on the floor. Forget about the puddles. Don't care about the puddles. Spread out like a starfish in the middle of the bed. Make the bed feel like home.
Stand in the kitchen, naked. Drink wine. Make coffee. Drink wine. Occupy both hands, all the time. Make your hands feel like home.
Imagine, just for a moment as you claim the hill to the side of the house, while carrying four bags of groceries and the Sunday paper that the man who pops onto his front porch in nothing but his dressing gown and and invites you in for a glass of water, or a cup of tea or- "anything you fancy,really" is just being neighborly. Entertain the thought of going in, just for a moment. Entertain the thought of saying, “This is what I will do to you.”
Sing all the songs no one knows you love. Play air piano as if you know what you're doing, no one can see you. Find yourself humming  bad disco or 70's porno soundtrack you've only just invented. Make yourself at home.
Ignore the ache. Ignore the way you've learned to recognize the sound of each individual eyelash.
Have lapses in judgment. Take them dancing. Take them to a bar. Wonder how many of the smug shiny people are building themselves a home, deep, somewhere hidden behind the spleen, working at being oblivious to the lithe limbs of lonely.
Consent to being set up on yet another bad date. Stop carrying the conversation, take up the conversation you had with yourself, earlier alone in bed, making sounds you'd forgotten you knew how to make- good thing you live alone. Wonder if you make him nervous because you just can't make yourself care about the silence emanating from his perch next to yours or the fact that his hand keeps lightly brushing your thigh and all you really want to say is "you've really got to commit to that or stop." The incessant buzzing  of a thousand gossamer mosquitoes. Wish you were home already. Start flirting with the waiter. Wonder what it will be like to wander home just slightly less then sober, stumble a little on your front porch, fish for your keys in the gaping hole of your pocket, take off one item of clothing for each progressive space between the front door and your bed, a bread crumb path for nobody, tonight- find your bed, the sound of your head on the pillow, the muffled crunch of one leaf under foot, one body carving itself a way to be whole, a way to be home.
And then suddenly, you...Wet and poetic and mine. This love like nothing I expected, like nothing I deserved...
 It happens to me all at once. Like falling from a great height. Not like puberty. Not like catching a glimpse of yourself in the mirror, both taken in and repelled by your new hips. Like the break of a half-pike off of a ten meter platform. Oxygenated, crystalline, whole.
The water making a sound you could cut fruit with.
What do I want from you? What do I want from myself?  A language, I want too much, I want everything. I want to be a beacon. The elegance of happenstance, the radiating undulating curve of a moan, or the moon.
 Take yourself apart. Start now, while your heart feels like peach flesh- gleaming, raw, the red-orange of a bad personal ad. This is no walk on the beach. The nubs around the pit like tiny thumbs imploring the oncoming traffic. Start here. On the greyest corner in the city, prototypical concrete glimmering in the late morning sunlight. Listen to the sound of the hose sluicing down the windows of the liquor store on the corner, the rivulets are giants tears washing away the splotches on the sidewalk, bruise purple, metallic.
What do I want? From myself?
Bruise purple, metallic. Thumbprints on thighs, I want to show everyone. But I don't. I hold in the memories, nurturing them in to the now, someday. Possible, I am fooled, the boy on the hill calling woolf to himself... What does love look like when it arrives? How will we know if we never open the door? Manifestation of pure ache. Right there on the concrete, waving from the heat. I want a way to express this moment.
Think. I could be anywhere. Trying to regulate my breathing, the raspy sound a thousand feathers.
Think. Listen to the men outside the liquor store argue in Arabic over rolls of red backgammon dice, clear like dime store candy, worthy of chipping a tooth on. Listen hard above the scuff of metal table legs wobbling precariously, flimsy like a baby animal on uneven ground. I am finished convincing myself I do not belong here, home arriving in my head every time you look at me, wet and poetic and mine, a secret code I am learning one character at a time...