Eileen R. Tabios

Eileen R. Tabios has released 16 print, four electronic and 1 CD poetry collections, a novel, an art essay collection, a poetry essay/interview anthology, and a short story book.  She most recently released a new poetry collection NOTA BENE EISWEIN (Ahadada, 2009) and a conceptual project disrupting the form of biography THE BLIND CHATELAINE'S KEYS (BlazeVOX, 2008).  Her poems have been translated into Spanish, Italian, Tagalog, Japanese, Portuguese, Paintings, Video, Drawings, Visual Poetry, Mixed Media Collages, Kali Martial Arts, Modern Dance and Sculpture. She blogs as the "Chatelaine" at http://angelicpoker.blogspot.com and edits GALATEA RESURRECTS, a popular poetry review journal at http://galatearesurrects.blogspot.com

THE BLUE MULE: AN AD(O)APTION TRIPTYCH


I. The Waiting

I have become "spare time."

I imagine-no, I know-I would not be in this moment if Marcos is here. I imagine, my son would be eating bacon with a deliberateness borne from the doomed desire never to hurt or offend my feelings. I imagine, if he were here, I already would have told him within an embrace polka-dotted by kisses (and told him several times previously as my full heart would not have been able to escape its blather), Let's emphasize certain things like protein. For you need to catch up.

Waiting can engender fulsome imagined narratives, fulsome for desire elevates the mundane.

Here, in this non-imagined space, I have just hung up the telephone. I have just conversed with a receptionist in a small city, booking myself into a future hour where a tooth's decayed cavity shall be replaced, shall be renewed. Shall be strengthened. Studies show dental health to be a critical component of overall health. That degraded teeth even will destabilize the heart.

While waiting, even the pleasure induced by dogs feels incrementally diminished.

And, huh, Julianne Hough, the TV blares, is a two-time "Dancing With The Stars" champion who must now leave the show mid-season to have her appendix removed. Waiting is a distress desperate for the relief of distraction. But, while waiting, "distraction" becomes redefined into something with an increased expanse.

In an artificially-widened expanse, something important can become diminished into mere irritation. Suddenly, a U.S. presidential campaign becomes white noise. (Okay, sigh: black and white noise.)

When waiting, the world becomes grey noise.

When waiting, the world settles into a role as background.

Pricking the edges of a consciousness barely clinging to itself is the painful knowledge that you are waiting, too. And that you are more fragile for you are, unlike me, a child. And that you are not even developed as much as the few years defining your age for you have been overlooked forever as you traversed the same dim, concrete hallways.

You are so young you cannot know to want, for time is compressed to the anxiety now shredding your fingernails as much as your heart. You do not long for me. You are simply confused at the existence of my absence.


II. Consignment

I had to start from scratch and my new Mom kept muttering something about the "Recession."

"All the clothes in the Consignment Shop are perfectly fine, Hijo." But I wouldn't have known how to judge beyond the relief of knowing I now possess more pairs of socks and underwear than the days of a week (that is, siete).

Also, I wanted to talk about other things than the thoughts in my brain which scare me. So I asked, "What does 'consignment' mean?"

Mom explained, "It's when people bring things they no longer want to the store, to see if the store's other customers would be interested in buying them."

I tried all day to ignore her answer. But my brain started to hurt like it was the middle of the night. So I whispered over the dinner plate ("with an extra serving of meatloaf"), "Is an orphanage a type of Consignment Shop?"

I didn't mean to surprise her. Then she took so long to answer I began to wonder if I would have to leave behind my new old-but-perfectly-fine red shirt whose collar feels strangely soft around my neck.

Mom replied, "No, Hijo. You are not a purchase or someone who can be bought. You are a gift."

I smiled then, and was pleased that she smiled back. I ate everything on my plate, then made her smile again by asking for more. She had explained to me that I needed to trick my body which, over the years, had trained itself to have little appetite because food, in the past, arrived rarely and randomly.

I just tucked the unanswered portion of my question deep into my brain where I felt it join the already long line of questions wanting their turn to haunt me late at night.

I always tried to trick the night by leaving on all of the lights in my bedroom. But Night is strong: Night always knows when it is its turn to rule the world, freeing all the questions which can be held back only by daylight.

Tonight, I shall whisper over the bedcovers, "I am uno regalo," but I already know the dream waiting to unfold:

There were children who once wore the clothes now hanging in my closet. What happened to them? Don't tell me the children outgrew those clothes as that answer implies progression, progress. At night, there is no future. At night, only memories are real, and the narratives are controlled by the past.


III. The Blue Mule

Along this path, progress can unfold only by redefining the entire contents of the dictionary. As one victim once posed after a night of terrorizing younger siblings, "What do you expect from someone who, as a baby, was abandoned?!"

I see a cloud and feel the hammer.

I see a mountain and feel the stove fire.

I see a tree and feel the rope.

I see the mule and feel the incredible sadness that only gods should feel because (i) they are omniscient, and (ii) they then would be seduced into mercy.

All these, I know and felt when I colored in the coloring book a philanthropist once donated: orange cloud, yellow mountain, red tree, blue mule…

What is reality? Old, I now know one thing: I have lived a life. But all that emanates from my toothless maw is the same question, stubbornly: "What exactly is real?"

I repeat with a helplessness I hate: Is the cloud orange? The mountain yellow? The tree red? The mule blue?! Hay naku!

Is the cloud
orange? Mountain
yellow?

Tree red? Mule
blue? What
is

real? What is
real? What
is?

Who was I
before the
hammer,

stove fire, rope,
and such
sadness

whose power should
have been
released

only to gods
powerful enough
for

mercy:
"Yes, the
mule is blue."