What starts as a love letter quickly transfigures into a recipe for bouillabaisse, quickly into a diagram of the different phases of Venus.  What started as a grocery list turned into a suicide note, which blossomed into what’s before me, exposed and pumping blood through chambers.  What begins as a monosyllable, bursts from its cocoon with fresh wings and an armada’s ambition.  Much like how it required a physicist to create the concertina, as soon as pen touches paper I am unbound by infinite possibilities.  What begins as a shorthanded attempt at a cornbread recipe, discovers electricity and stands on legs, grasps with hands, speaks with a dumb cut tongue.

            Inspired only by the prima causa, I chase Mia around the world, through Amazonian rain forests and Persian deserts, through the Caucasus and across the Cumberland, through crowded Hong Kong streets and across the vast open area of the frozen tundra.  I spot her in sidewalk Parisian cafes, seated in front of a hookah in the middle of Morocco.  I see her in a dark Danish corner, dissolving sugar into a glass of absinthe.  On a Thai street being pulled in a rickshaw.  I watch natives worship her and Spaniards break bottles over her backside before setting for sail.  Adorned:  in camouflage, in sequined dress, in long black veil, in nipple shields, in lederhosen. 

            I see her in courtyards, and she sees me in corners, mouths suggestive verbs at me.  She beckons me to follow though she doesn’t slow down to let me catch up. 

            In the Chunnel to London.  In a hot air balloon to Helsinki.  In a catamaran to Cuba.  I’m prepared with fins and tank to follow her to the depths of the mid-Atlantic ridge where she runs her hands along the jagged proof the earth once had a heart and had it broken badly. 

            How many celestial bodies have they named in her honor? 

            With a long slender finger she beckons me, and I follow her:  to Fuji, to flotsam, to Finland, to forlorn.  To forlorn and back.