To be the smallest man alive

To travel light as snail shell, spore, steam

To make thimble, cowbell, a boy’s ear

My caravan, my cave

To take up residence next door to the Feejee Mermaid

Listen to Chang and Eng’s consanguineous whispers

And pin on my lapel a new name:

The Prince of Humbug’s English General

To become a figment of my own imagination

Fabulous creature worth twenty million glances

To live, circumambulate, die

On the cusp of eclipse

To have my picture taken

On a cold day in May

By a woman with raw hands

In Belfast in the rain

To see myself in sepia (all three feet

Seventy pounds awkward and foreshortened)

Once only, the daguerreotype lost

Within the year, image a gravel dissolve

Into that odd year 2001 where I turn up

Unaccountably mounted, oak-edged midget

In a market on the River Farset

The invisible Farset

Found out by the spoorsman who’s tracked me

Ocean-sea to ocean-sea

My profile–freakish annunciation–

At the elbows of his patronage

You eye me up.

I eye you down.

Maximo: your brotherly husband.

Bartola: my sisterly wife.

Your elongated Egyptian eye.

My Panamanian profile.

Our identical peaked skull domes

Remembering the snows of Popocatepetl.

One word: chalk. (Mine)

Another word : cheese. (Yours)

We talked when they weren’t looking

And married when they were.

Innocent idols snatched

From the Lost City of Iximaya

Somewhere between North and South

America we left behind a fictional jungle

Its jade birds the colour of our mother’s eyes

Its torrential rivers our father’s thighs.

What is the meaning of sacrifice?

To die with or without your hands and feet?

Fidelity is the religion of the sideshow.

Fidelity and silence.

You and I, two peas in a pod

Two pinheads in a bottle.

Short skirts, the both of us we

Shy away from the tilting camera

To gaze exclusively, one on one,

Fingers looped round the limits of affection.