WOUNDS Cecile Ann Lawrence

All circuits are busy

All circuits are busy Try another time. What other time? So little time. When humans worshipped goddesses, did men rape women? All circuits are busy Try another time. Advent, Chanukah, Ramadan all at the same time. All the same. When the English invaded Ramadam land, the English admired them for being such fierce fighters, a worthy enemy. Alpha males both. Why did they not leave them be? Why not let it be, let it be? Fierce fighters, fight, fit, fe, fi, fo, fum, I smell the blood of an Englishman. So little time. Sitar wails, violins swoon, tabla heart beats thunder of bombs, come to me, come to me, come to me. Your bazooka enters me, fire burning in the night, reaching to touch the stars. You were so full of fear. You are so full of fear. Pushed over the edge, I let it fall out in the broken pieces of glass. Mother? Hold me safe. You cant. You

fall and fall and fall over the edge all the time, smiling and chatting, gatherings spirit not gathering spirit. But the eyes, the eyes. Not here.

So little time. All circuits are busy Try another time. Don't even bother sitting on the medicine wheel, I don't know what the message is. All circuits are busy Try another time. So when shall I talk with you? Where are you? I dont know. I cant reach you. Try another time. So full of fear. Numb. An entire continent of walking wounded numbing with fermented grain, distilled poppy, inhaling burning leaves. All circuits are busy Try another time. As I came to be, the worm crawled in your belly. As I came to be, you created distance. As I came to be, you cut me off at the knees before I even had knees, before my cells died to create fingers.

As I came to be, you abandoned me. And so I wander, a gypsy. All circuits are busy Try another time. Metal, filled with flesh, a million years of dead fossils fueling fire, pierces phallic virginity. Flames leap to touch and awaken the Sun God - Ra. All circuits are busy Try another time. I am out there, floating, waiting, riding on waves of light, high, so high above I am free. You aim your fire through the faint cross-hatches on the skin on my hands. Such fierce fighters, they deserve admiration. When people worshipped goddesses, did men rape women? Alpha male, beats his chest and roars, silver back hidden under an Armani sharkskin suit, struts his stuff, and his name is. All circuits are busy Try another time. Such a beautiful body, hard, light muscles rippling, but empty cave tunnels under the shell, Because of such fear. Sitar wails, tabla heart beats. Get off my back, get OFF my back, get off my BACK, I shout . . . in my sleep as you rest dead weight between my shoulder blades.

How shall I reach you? Are you really there? Mother? Never really here. Not connected. Not On the line. All circuits are busy Try another time. What is time? What time is it?

Mothers mothers mothers mother: Empty, I know, Mem-ma Empty

A boy of 6 or 7 stands beside the girl Im told is me, on my left, his right hand grasping the left handle of the tricycle. On my right is a girl of 5 or 6, standing, holding onto the right handle bar with her left hand. All three faces have varying levels of grim determined expressions although, in the middle, I look fairly calm. My hands are invisible. Where did they go? Already I have started to disappear. These three children are neither black nor white. I have never thought to show that photo to anyone except one or two very special people in the U.S. To go back earlier than that photo leads to an empty place, which isnt empty, but is hidden. What seems empty has content thats hiding? Why dont I know that boy and his sister, who they are? Why dont I know them now? Im trying to find the key to unlock the door to the house that had the yard in the picture with the tricycle and the three young humans. I can only guess that the house behind the three children had my baby self.

I know and I dont know

I know what the hell do I know? except learning, practicing saying no. My mothers starting to do that, To practice saying no after years of being pushed around, a whole lifetime of being pushed around. No. No more.

Her rage barely seeps through so excellent is her control over it. I dont know, but yet I know why shes doing this. She reached the point. What I dont know is why now. Whats the trigger? An invitation to go to the New York Botanical Garden and she says no, pouting, like a child. But, get this, shes now in a wheelchair, so shes still being pushed around.

I know the caged bird that she may feel like now. She never ever got to fly that I know of. Every one of us has the birthright to fly, and she never ever got to fly. How her rage must burn, But shes got it well under control, she thinks, as unaware it seeps, and courses, twisting this way and that way through her veins, tissues, tendons, erupting here as arthritis, there as heart palpitations, over there as shortness of breath and fainting away so they rush her off in an ambulance to the hospital, hook her up to clicking, beeping machines which tell them her hearts fine for someone her age in a wheelchair. Her hearts fine, so fine, fine.

You stupid idiots! Why cant you see the gash across her heart from never ever being able to fly? Men, man, the system, the culture, her parents who left her as an infant in the keep of a grandmother way out in the country, isolated, no one her age to play with, only the lizards and birds in the bush. Where she would lose her glasses, as an infant, and then her grandmother would beat her for that. Eyeglasses must have been really expensive during the U.S. economic depression which bled into the island.

Mem-ma

The pain of my grandmother beating me for losing my glasses. I need to take on the imagined person of my mother as a little girl, trying to draw the pain out of her that I imagine embedded deep in her cells. How could it not be? I dont know what she feels now, except that she tends to say she doesnt remember when I tell her something about her childhood that earlier she had told me, or she even adamantly says it did not happen. Memory. Un-released rage corrupts memory. My hand stops. The pain of its tingling interrupts. But still, still the pain,

still the pain cannot, cannot be anywhere like that of my mother as a little bird, as her grandmothers hand came down hard on her little body. I want to draw the pain out of my mothers body, sending it deep into the ground, right to the core where the hot fires there will burn it and mutate its structure. Pulling out the pain without pulling it into me, not taking it on, but taking it away. Regret, disappointment, and, of course, how could it not be, my old friend and companion, burning rage.

Mother, smiling her role, caught in the startle response, did not know how to, could not nurture her own infant. Thus deprived of the release of oxytocin occurring with early nuturing, the infant grew never being able to respond, numb to the core, for the rest of her life. Man says to her, in his throes of free-falling off the cliff, Move, dammit! She cant, does not know, cannot feel, is gone away. Until the homeopath came with his tools. Trying over and over to get, without knowing shes trying to get, to that place where the sky-diving contraction of desire kicks in, she dances, by herself, swaying, stepping around and around and around, dervish-like, lost, shifting between branes as people sit at tables, sipping in the dark, watching her, wondering.

Mothers grandmothers hand reaches out from beyond that crossover point and hits me hard. I move my entire arm back, working up towards a hard return slap.

But I stop. My mothers grandmother beat my mother because thats what the colonial system indoctrinated her that she should do. Its not great-grandmother that I should hit, throw to the ground, and knee in the chest. Its Christopher Columbus, who must die for humanity to live, says brother Russell Means. Its General stinking Penn and unvenerable Admiral Venables and the f-king king of England, the Pope whose descendant popes still have not revoked the bull that declared that lands Columbus invaded were empty if no Christians lived there, thereby declaring open season on my indigenous ancestors, all those men up to that point before my great-grandmother raised her hand in fury. Yet, still I am not appeased. Something remains. Burning. My mother tells me that she was in labor with me for three days. Did I not want to be here? Did I already know what it would be like, even before I came to the planet?

Caecilius the blind one: Eyes open wide, Below the radar epilepsy

Eyes open wide

Trying to focus and losing the struggle most of the time tires me as well as you. Eyes open wide, I try to see, to make sense, straining against history. But you have slashed a hot blade across my eyes and I am blind. Any hint of less than perfection leads only to the inevitable conclusion of flawed genes. I bleed. From the start, way back. Its best not to say anything, but to continually maintain silence, please. Do not leave me standing stranded in the middle somewhere as I crave an edge for vision. Straining to no avail. Closeness to darkness sources in the layers of taut pressure against the brain stem. Lying there, waiting. You may claim this makes no sense. Like seeds floating in the dry wind, trying to find a rich spot on which to drop down, resting a while,

filled over, then grow. In the warmth of sunshine, that only eyes above could ever sense, I see where you lie. Give over, the rocking side to side soon comes to an end, without even the slightest motion towards a start. I begin to speak, yet again. The young woman in the video spoke calmly saying that if she ever began to really speak, she would never shut up. And then they would call her angry. A woman who speaks her truth is always blind with rage. They say she is an angry woman. They refuse to face the feelings that rocking from side to side erupt to the surface. Needs must push them down again deep into the cavernous cellars of centuries of women, like children, should be seen and not heard. Thus, woman becomes, is made, invisible. Still.

Below the radar epilepsy

I went blind today. For a moment While preparing a legal contract for signature. I went blind with rage today For a moment While, while, while, what happened? A blank spot, a blank time, a blank space. What happened? when? Typing, talking while typing, talking, trying to protect the rights of the person waiting for me to finish typing, explaining while Im typing, tying up myself, the contract, the person, spinning, trying to focus, to see, and then I went blind. Just for a moment. Long enough to not see that I had deleted the one sentence with the sanction the punishment should fit the crime, the crime,

what is the crime really? what the person waiting for me to finish typing Did? Did? did? like a glitch in the CD as its playing the discordant music of my life, Or that I went blind just for a moment and the single time I went for a test for epilepsy, scheduled only because I insisted there was something epilepsy-like going on, when I go blind just for a moment, when I check out, go somewhere else I dont know where, But the results were negative, even though on driving away from having been subjected to flashing lights in their examination room, I went blind, just for moment. They refused to allow my testimony. Refused, refused, refused, A fuse sparks in my brain, A fuse sparked in my brain, A fuse sparks in my brain, sparks, chhhhhhhhhhhh.

As I went blind today and then, time enough to miss the turn to the on-ramp onto the highway home. Should I take that round black thing Ive seen in pictures that has a lit fuse on one end, that now resides in my brain? Should I take it and throw it with perfect accuracy to the ones who will not listen to me, the nurses, doctors, technicians, who insist on looking at their bleeping machines, their tests, their graphs that tell them its just in my head, here, take this prescription for a tranquilizer, go away, dont bother us, we dont want your testimony, its useless, we have faith and belief only in our machines and graphs and charts, you are just a dumb-ass stupid female who knows nothing, (should I throw in the skin color thing, for good measure, who knows what THEIR dumb-ass stupid selves and system are thinking?) because you dont have access to the information that our twinking, blinking, whirring, chirping, grunting, spitting gizmos that you dont even know the name of, which we keep private from you, because you wouldnt understand anyway, so here, take this prescription and stop bothering us about

what you could not have, because our machinery told us that you dont have it. I went blind today, just for a moment. Taking one step, then another, One breath, then another, up the stairs, trying to get away, but theres no escape from their fixation on their religious belief in their medicine of machines.

I screamed inside after, I realized that I went blind today, just for a moment, and I remembered that I knew and know and will know to the deepest part of me, that their machines suck. Crude, just like their medicine. Lacking in sensitivity, just like their attitude towards you in the waiting, waiting, waiting for ever waiting room. Treating you like a box on an assembly line to be folded up and taped shut. Shut up! I know, I know, my testimony is . . . that . . . your . . . machines . . . suck! My witness is that

I went blind today just for a moment but enough to make a difference between producing a valid or invalid contract in the work I do to get the money so as to pay the bill you send me to tell me thats its just all in my head. I went blind today and you refused to see it. Therefore, I refuse to see you.

Mens-true-al sana

The unconscious, filled with drumming tom-toms, primordial snakes as people, people as snakes, mental formations of those on whom you would wish to depend watching you, policing you, memories of playing the piano to get away, suspicions of the desires of patriarchal others to eradicate your existence through eugenics and its modern version in the Human Genome Project, steam as mist from an about to erupt volcano. You cover your face to hide your mind from yourself.

Truth-telling unmasks

Masks

Masks, you and I, we wear masks. Real me, true you, behind pretty masks. Where are you? All glass, does not break, not yet, mask still hides. Sticks to you, sticks on me, like glass glued, to slip and pass. Don't mess with me, back off, too close, much too close to be unraveling the thin, tight threads of my mask. You must not see me who I am. Your mask and mine protect us from the spinning. Your laugh blares shallow from your throat, heart locked tight behind the brass mask wound right tight around your ribs.

Eyes, looking straight into mine, glazed, not seeing, daring me to pierce the steely mask at my peril.

Yet I see through that concrete veil to the burning controlled rage volcanic deep within you. Some of us, like you and me, we dance and they marvel as we spin, our masks shining bright, so much a part of my part and your part, we cannot part except in pain.

Which one to choose? The blinding numbness of keeping the mask tight to my soul, or the wrenching fear of peeling, stealing light from dark, soul see me now for the first time, one last time, be true, be real, soft, new. Come again, clean, first ever.

Truth I wrote truth, for the first time perhaps. I spoke truth and didnt burn in fire. Dying from something. Lack of lark in life. Lack of life, writing life and the truth. What is the way for forms to appear from chaos? For invisible molecules to form an ocean? Trying or writing?

People talking about why, what, what happened when, when, when will they stop, stop, say or go, go, just want to write, help, help, work, or play, name, emani, ha, ha, what, the joke, the personal stories when they go or come or stay or leave or digest, eat, journey, stay, come, Im, Im, Im, who, what, when, NOW. Words are shards.

The Balm yard

Healing in the balm yard forms part of memory shaken loose, tumbling through the oceanic wormhole, processing, exuding poison, multigenerational toxic illusions about gender and race, compressing and controlling, spirit rending. A mento song, composed early in the evolution of Jamaican-born music, long before reggae, a composite blend of African and European, lively or of minuet-like slow deliberate stepping. Music made with home-made rhumba-box and banjo home music Africa music. Healing in the balm yard at night, dark-skinned people in white fabric crouched down, some sitting, feet bare on the hard-packed dirt, in a large circle, men pounding on djembes, first gently, introducing, encouraging someone, usually a woman, who comes, stumbling out from the dark safety of the circle, as if drunk/drugged, infused with the toxicity of Babylon, into the center near the fire. Desperately seeking healing from forces that oppress and drive spirit sickness inwards to manifest as bodily dis-ease, she begins to dance, swaying, spinning, the long white skirt of her dress wheeling outwards, grasped by crashing waves that throw her whirling, twisting, into a wormhole vortex of horrible healing, for as long as it takes, through undertow after undertow, all night and day even for those so thoroughly sickened, shuddering, screaming, vomiting. The communal drums pace, rhythm and volume increase as they shape-shift into

one drum. The air vibrates. In the center she trembles, her body jerks, lurches repeatedly, shaking loose the poison of slavery, indenture, colonization, poverty, rejection, blame, stinking worms escaping through the skin of body/spirit. Falling to the ground, she lies still for a while. The lead drummer beats the signal to stop thump-tha-da-thump/thump--thump-thump. Shimmering in the dark, the air, at low tide, breathes slowly in, then out, and then in again. The figure in white in the center gets up, smiles and laughs and screams out loud, running around, alive, free at last, or for a while, then goes back to rejoin the circle. The drumming begins again, drawing out the next person in pain, usually a woman, to come to the center of the community for healing. In the balm yard. The men watch and wait.

I felt in a dreamlike waking state, a bit restless. To settle down, I decided to draw. This is the result. I did have the idea of some kind of streetlight, but no other ideas while drawing. It seems like the heads could be of people lost in a fog, searching for some kind of direction. Sounds familiar. Notice the sequence of the lights. What does it mean? Afterwards I thought the sequence reminded me of the ridiculous and manipulative terror alerts a while back. Funny how they don't do them so much anymore, unless it's because I'm not paying attention to the media outlets where they may remain. Im at a sub-atomic traffic-light, waiting for something.

End the fiction of race categorization

After more than 15 years of frustrating conversations with people in this country about the racist system of governmentally sanctioned racial/ethic categorization used here, I despair of ever seeing even a tiny light at the end of the tunnel. Some time ago, the category multiracial was added to the U.S. census, but it turns out that if you checked that category on the form, the number crunchers at the U.S. Census Bureau put you under the category of African-American. Race labeling is solely a political invention with no basis in science. There is no genetic marker for race. Furthermore, genes are transferred randomly from one generation to the next. Genetic purity is a fiction, in the absence of severely controlled intra-breeding, such as in the Amish in the U.S., sometimes resulting in horrendous defects. Even hate-mongering fanatics, focused on the fiction of racial purity, whether they are in the United States or in Bosnia, are genetically mixed themselves. My position on the issue of race was published in the anthology Microdiversity. As part of their reports about a march on Washington, D.C. advocating the inclusion of a multiracial category on the census, The New York Times quoted statements from my article. In the very process of their reporting on attempts of parents of multiracial children to resist single race labels being attached to their children, the writers and perhaps the parents themselves fell into the trap of referring to themselves as black and white. Many white parents and many black parents in the U.S. are mixed genetically, especially if their families have been in the country for several generations.

This often greatly surprises both black and white when they have an mtDNA test done on a swab of skin cells from inside the cheek. While mixing the races might appear to be a new phenomenon in this country, it has been going on for generations, although denied. This mixing is openly acknowledged in the Caribbean and Latin America, although those areas have their race fixations too, albeit more closely focused on gradations of color, rather than a strict black/white obsession. When people come to the United States from those areas, unless previously acculturated to the U.S. worldview by television, etc., many are flabbergasted at the amount of energy that people in the U.S. spend on trying to determine what single racial label to affix to them. Almost every waking hour in this country, I have had to spend an exhausting amount of energy to resist attempts of those who wish to control my thoughts, control my self-identity, to deny me my existence as I am. All those so-called light-skinned blacks are really no such thing. Many prominent people in the U.S. labeled as the first black this or that are no such thing. Maybe theyre really dark-skinned whites. Fiction and more fiction. To persist in categorizing as black or African-American those of us who have in their ancestry any or all mixtures of the vast array of East Indian, Chinese, Native American, German, English, Portuguese, Syrian, Japanese, etc., you name it, along with African, is to perpetuate the racist, slavery-derived notion that a single drop of black blood is so terrible a stain as to eradicate all other ancestors. Note that I referred to countries of origin. That is as far as I am willing to go. Note also that the whole concept of tracing blood origin in halves, quarters, one-

eighths, etc. is based again the slave labels of mulatto, quadroon, octoroon, and is scientifically fraudulent as, I repeat, genes transfer randomly from one generation to the next. Race labeling becomes very dangerous when medical researchers, primarily in the United States, fall into the trap of using it in their research. In pharmaceutical research, a pool of subjects labeled as black who respond in what appears to be a consistent way to one medication, are responding for a reason other than because of that political label, and we wont know what that reason is, as long as medical researchers persist in saying its because of race. When the daughter of a prominent baseball star was dying of leukemia, he made public pleas for African-Americans to volunteer more blood samples for bone marrow transplants. What happened to the girls mother, who is Jewish? Shouldnt the pool for a match have been widened to include people from Jewish groups, from people with Jewish parents? Why was the mother excluded? The pool of subjects labeled as black is much too mixed genetically to make it rational to consider them as homogenous. Scientists and medical researchers who perpetuate the one-drop-rule way of thinking encourage the reification of bad, fraudulent science. We will never get rid of the idea that to appear to have some genetic material from the so-called dark continent is to be defective, less than pure, until we acknowledge that racial purity is a political fiction, and until we realize the sanity of valuing equally each and every ancestor in the backgrounds of every one of us.